almost to my valediction.

I seem to have acquired a terrible case of writer's block in the last few weeks. Someone once told me that in order to get over this sort of affliction, you just have to work right on through it. I worked through it with a note; I worked through it with words on top of words.

I left a note on your pillow for the very last time. Writing it, tears fill my eyes. I imagine your eyes skimming my words, dry and dark, deep and understanding. Understanding, but something tells me they do not empathize, they do not get at the core of how I am feeling. I think I am alone in that way. I wonder at your strength as the tears dry where they were never truly started.

The sky has turned a dark gray. And as it gets darker, I imagine the morning sky embracing blackness and turning itself around into night. In the nighttime, I imagine your arms cradling me, putting me to sleep. I try to remember how I fell into bed the night before, if you held me at all. Nothing comes back but blackness. In the morning, you tried to tuck in all the covers around me, but I whimpered and the ceiling spun again. I closed my eyes and tried to take it back, my last night in your bedroom. Instead, you closed your door and said "sleep." I slept. For what felt like days, I tossed and turned on your mattress, battling back against a throbbing headache caused by the emptiness of your indented pillowcase. If there was anything conscious in my sadness of sleep, it was my awareness of the nothing you leave when you are gone.

I finally wake up enough to take a shower. I speak to your roommate for what is probably the last time, take a shower in your bathroom, leave hair in your drain, brush my teeth. I take a pen off of your desk (which used to be mine, and I miss terribly the way it used to sit in my luminous room beside the bed we first slept in and the nightstand where I kept my journal) and rip a piece of paper from your notebook.

I begin to write. At first it is slow. I write your name. I see myself here again in the month of June, with the heat already coming in through your open window at 9 AM. I see myself here in May, our bodies wet from the hot tub, my eyes wet with tears I could no longer hold back in the darkness. I see myself here in May, where we first began, wishing it were April again, so I could meet you all over again and we could go back to my apartment and drink wine while tracing our fingers along a map of the United States of America (several days later, I was re-tracing your steps to California, going back to Chicago, where you started). I see myself on your bed that morning in October. It is my birthday. My head is spinning and my hair is wet. My eyes haven't started filling with tears yet. I see you left me a bottle of water, and I put the pen to the paper and breathe.

It is hard to know where to begin, so I tell you I will miss you. I don't tell you that I already do. I don't tell you I can feel that you've already left in so many ways. I begin with memories of you and I, and I find that I can't stop writing. Your apartment is full of memories: early mornings, late mornings, salmon, waffles, breakfast burritos, late nights, early nights, wine, watching television, margaritas, swimming, surfing, kissing, cuddling, smoking, so much laughter, ice cream, running errands, eating dinner, slipping out of my jeans and into your bed that starts out so cold until you follow me and I feel your breath against my forehead and you kiss me and it leaves a warm, damp mark. I keep writing, and I can't stop, and, by the end, I am crying until I see your dry eyes in my head, and I get angry.

I feel like time has gotten away from us both. Somehow one night turned into seven months. We barely spoke of the future, and we never spoke of the past. Seven months, and I still know so little. I only know that you are stronger than I am. I only know that when you picked up that note, you didn't cry like I did when I wrote it. I wish my words had the power to translate all of the ways you meant something to me, but something tells me they don't. That is the curse of words: I can cry and write them, and you can smile and never understand a thing I say.