When I crossed the town line, as usual I could feel the car pressing into the bank of silence, but there was a knot of something humming inside me. I parked. I walked up the flat paving stones to my front door in silence, with the long shadows of the passing day lying all around me on the ground, draped over my walls and my roof. I went inside and replaced my work clothes with my after-work clothes. My living room was like a kiln of emptiness. I sat in it, trying not to fill, but your eyes —

I looked down at my torn hand. My vision swam.

From that day, I was afraid to see you again. You didn’t frighten me. Something had gone out of line in me when I saw your eyes, though, because your eyes could never see things my way—you could join me in silence, but not in that silence. That silence was the domain of only solitary people. Even that isn’t right; it isn’t a landscape of isolated people, but an empty landscape, empty even of me; where there is a presence, but only as one, the pronoun “one.”

Just the other day, I wouldn’t have been able to refer to my heart without smiling. I mean, smiling with derision. The idea that I had “a heart,” which was—was it only yesterday?—such a quaint and comical thing to think, was now the only thing, the only problem.

Driving in my car, I found myself litanizing your flaws, whatever I could think of—and it was all nonsense. I was someone who had preferred not to have preferences. How could I identify flaws? I knew you weren’t perfect, but this was only abstract. We all know not to think in terms of perfection. And what was the point of trying to reason with something that had nothing to do with reason, and what was reason to me or me to reason? If I said a word to you about—it would make—

I only want to say numbly ordinary things to you and make no difference. I litanized you, thinking foolishly that I would find flaws and somehow talk myself out of—it was just one more way to think about you, and it only further provoked that quickening something inside me—my heart.

If I said a word to you it would make—things—real, too real—

I’d be—more than exposed—I’d be concrete, all too real myself—