These are never true: the claims of crimes we would never complete. We are less/more than that. Incapable of the self-awareness that would allow false statements to dissolve. Look at all the convolutions of the brain. Economy of surface area. Accordioned and twisted. Like everything contained within. The deep, laughterless hilarity of a cosmic joke.

So when I say I would never, I don’t ever, the smug horror is evident. The mirror of language distorts my waist wide and my face tall. The hypocrisy is both conscionable and inevitable. This silence, within which I bide and abide, is a form of delusion. I wait for my turn to speak, knowing I will never hear above the bluster of voice curving across the continents.

Somewhere subcutaneous, I have stored these scraps. Songs, words, phrases. Sand, gravel, and soil collected within my shoes. The sibilance of memories hissing between muscle and bone. Inside the second knuckle of my right hand, I keep the scent of his neck. The air of an autumn evening spools on my patella and laces down my tibia. This melody coils around my ulna and snaps in leather cuffs around my wrists.

The problem is that the soul moves young as the body ages. And so home becomes this brief intersection of spiritual and physical. Perhaps I passed thought without ever knowing that home was not among tangible symbols of relative location. Perhaps I lost it in the imperfect rhyme of fingerprints on the doorknob and footsteps down the corridor.

The slanted light gives a kind of peace to this scene. Despite the brown-gold leaves skipping and whirling down the gutter. But that wasn’t where we were when one drop of wine slid onto the table cloth. The cascade that should have been rain fell as a transient flurry snow, and I forgot to say too much. This one time. An opinion bitten off and swallowed mid-phoneme.

We abandoned an entire season, you know. Dropped away and ignored months of a storyline. A year. I think. Of the dead parts of spring. Mornings when not even the strongest coffee would pull us from hibernation and we growled protesting consciousness into our pillows.

My love, this lack of intention is worse than any attentive action. Because I couldn’t. Within the shape and texture of citrus skin. Find words that wouldn’t pucker on my tongue.