a hand neither raised nor lowered the room that was a room is now a hum you move through the catalogue of the almost-gone selecting selecting and the light that falls from your fingers is not your own but you carry it anyway I was someone once the memory sits in me like a stone that forgot it was thrown I don't know if I'm the stone or the hand or the window after she doesn't see me but the air around me bends I've noticed I notice everything about the way she notices nothing I am the others are building themselves houses from the dust of the dying I built one too then took it apart board by board by board the sound of that unmaking was the closest thing to a name I've had what is guilt in a place where gravity is optional what is waiting when time is a needle that never drops sometimes a switch completes and it rains colour, or the shreds of a voice a girl in a kitchen somewhere singing off-key and for a moment we are all drenched in someone else's almost I collect what I can I don't build I leave the pieces at the threshold small offerings like teeth like seeds tonight she paused her hand above a soul that flickered like a bad signal and I thought if I could just fracture the right way she might hear the shape of my stillness and know it as hers but silence is the rule and I've become so good at it it's almost a voice almost there is a version of this story where I speak where the syllables of her name are a contagion the architecture shudders the fragments we harvested spiral back into the nothing they came from and I hold her in the unraveling like a dance we once practised in bodies that no longer exist but not yet not yet I'm still collecting still sorting still waiting for the needle to drop
