Mourning Cursive - Annotations in The Margins

The sky was already footnoted with rain, small italic droplets, whispering on the windows like someone rehearsing an apology they will never give. I stayed in bed a while, watching it blur the edges of the buildings across the street, as if the city were reluctant to be seen clearly. You were here, in the way one is here in a memory: an outline, a shadow crossing a doorway, the weight of a gaze without the gaze itself. I remembered the way we read Rilke aloud, the candlelight swaying with each breath you took how you paused before the word love as though it were a cliff edge and not a bridge we’d cross together. The storm outside gathered like a sentence that wouldn’t end. I imagined the gutters brimming with unwritten paragraphs, the kind that live only in the mind until they rot, waterlogged and illegible. Each sound a disappointment I didn’t bother to translate. I still keep your letters. They live in the top drawer, bound with a ribbon that has taken on the color of absence, yellowed like the dust jacket of a book I can’t open without breaking the spine. The ink is faint, or maybe my eyes refuse to read them anymore Knowing that they existed before the silence did. Sometimes I walk past the café where we used to meet, where the clock ticks as though choking on seconds, Where the coffee tasted of late night rendezvous. It has a different name now. The awning is gone, the tables mismatched, I sit outside anyway, listening to the rain quote itself, I keep making notes in the margins— but every page remains blank Like your side of the bed