I wrote this in the afternoon, an unusual time for me to brood alone when the sun hadn’t set and the sky wasn’t saturnine. I had slept little, eaten less in the past three weeks and the butterfly bones in my chest were becoming more palpable with each passing day. There was nothing particularly different about this afternoon, the air was still unbearably torrid for October and I was resisting the pressing urge to phone you. Eighty six degrees and I was hoping to inure myself to the heat or sweat it out; life was moving so slow.

DECEMBER of 2015, we sat across from each other at an unpronounceable Italian restaurant forty five minutes away and ate calamari with forks for the very first time. He wore a salmon-pink shirt and I laughed at the way he laughed at my jokes. We were strangers meeting blindly with folded cloth napkins on our laps, having nothing in common except for a quintessential naivety and a brown-eyed innocence.

Sundays with him were languorous and mornings were long. Most nights would consist of sitting cross legged like a sheepish childish, asking him if he’d ever been in love. We were nineteen and sneaking out of our parents’ houses to book a cheap hotel or tiptoe into the neighbor’s chlorine pool.

Now we are apart more than ever, allowing the dichotomy to dissimulate how we feel when we sit at the dinner table alone but together. We have closed the curtains and forgotten about the morning light. We have forfeited what it felt like to feel because it became all too demanding; we are afraid to flesh it out. We have lost trust and faith only to find the other asleep and alone or angry and awakened; to believe the other’s ways to be invariable. We have devoid ourselves of the truth when the door opens past midnight and the other turns to sleep on their side; the dissonance between us two.

But, in a greater scheme, we cannot be uncompromising— we cannot be intransigent— in the fertile hands of love. We cannot make promises and neglect them, allow them to starve until forgiven or forgotten; we cannot leave things unsaid. We must remember that this is merely a travesty of who we are, and we must not forget how it felt to be tender and kind and children at play. It is today that we must cleanse ourselves of our laconic tendencies and cease seeing things only as the color of clay. It is today that we must promise, and truly promise, that we will rise and never disappear again like morning dew; that we will lay back down with our hands behind our heads and laugh at the falling leafs; that we will know that with every crunch of snow, forgiveness will follow, and we will try again.