saturday, august 3. perhaps we never met. perhaps she never existed and i invented her or perhaps it was me, struggling to outlast my own restlessness

we still have some things in common, the city or the rooms. not exactly empty, hardly full, with the small unbalanced weight of us inside them, looking at the distance between the window and the wardrobe, the bathroom and the table, the nightstand and the bed. if they give us nothing else, there is always a bed. the highways and cities outside don't matter. i am in my room, and you are in yours, with the distance between us too deep to see. the way to pick you up and drop you home. i still remember it was very cold. the taxi stammered, wandered, and stopped outside your home. cold mist kept coming, nothing to stop it, and my skin or jacket still smelled of holding you, which is to say of that goodbye, which seemed hardly final at all and also like tumbling over into nothing, no one. although i am an adult, we are both adults and quite aware that we can live without anybody, anything. there are very few losses we won't survive after our fashion, keeping ourselves from the thoughts we would rather not have and breathing and blinking and swallowing as we should. we look very much like other adults, are credible. i wanted to call you and say how much longer your scent lingered than it should have. i avoided taking baths because it seemed like my body couldn't wash away what wouldn't go away. i need to see the black flame of your hair suggesting the black flame in your head, and i think i need to feel the way your stomach flinches under touch, that nice shyness, and i need the way you smell, and i need to see you smile. i need to see you smile. but i am wrong, of course: i don't need it. what i have must be enough. no one survives without having enough. i have the light from the smoke alarm in the ceiling, the pinprick of red ticking on and off, and i have this tiredness and this fear that all there is left will be waiting by myself while dying comes closer. you said you were afraid all of the time. now that's how i am, too, but i can't tell you. i have no story to tell because you don't want one. i have this which you won't reply to. whatever form of words i find, it will make no difference. there's nothing more you'll let me say to you. i work in invisible words, unsay myself in rooms i don't want and don't know, and i keep on the road to stay ahead of so much silence, to be beside you in this one way. my love never was any better than that.

hassan