1. What I Would Ask You


Recently I have been having trouble grasping
the notion of “rubble”. And so there

it went: the accumulation of dust,
dust unto dust, giving form to dust, us, all

dust-like, but not really. I get how it
happened. I get how we are. I don’t get

the reversion. I don’t understand how form
can crumble. Where did your fingernails go?

Sometimes, on FaceTime, you’d show me
your fingers. How big they had gotten. Puffy.

You painted them black one day
on the call, your fingernails. I talked

at you, I talked about movies I’d seen.
Were they painted on that last day?

Was there still some black, chipping
at the corners on that last day, specks
crumbling to the floor on that last day?


2. What Was True


In Love by Gaspar Noe the main character is named Murphy. We said that our kid would be named Murphy. You said that you wanted to name your first kid Murphy. But there was a kid before Murphy, a real one, one with Form and Body and Skin, Breath. The extent of Murphy’s existence was your existence and we both knew that both of those were fallible. There is no use in finding fault with your faultiness. I think that it was a product of the situation: the warp-ed-ness of the way that we circled around each other, miles apart. Although it never truly felt like that. The distance, that is. Most things were lies but felt true, like how we promised to Meet Up. What did that mean, Meet Up. It was a big, sad idea we often talked about: A drive-in movie. Going to Jones Beach. Getting lunch. Breakfast. And sex, we spoke so highly of our sex like we knew it’d be something sublime. You, with your nonexistence, you, with your shadow of a body, an arched back, ghost kiss. I wanted that shadow form so badly, that shadow form cast over me, draped, stretched skin on skin. I imagined conceiving Murphy like some kind of holy rite, giving bodily shape to two entities so very destined for it. For life, living, sexing, Meeting Up, and those sorts of things.

This is true:

You had a daughter
named Autumn, a fiancé
named Mira, and your Tinder bio was:
“I’m super into ruining my life but I always have a great time doing it.”
We were never destined for anything else, really.


3. There was no funeral


I never questioned your existence then, so I wonder why
it’s so hard for me to believe your death now. And it’s not
the kind of oh I can’t believe this could happen shit. Sometimes
I think that this is seriously some kind of grand joke: a ploy
conducted by you, or Mira, or your Dad, maybe. Someone
found out about us and confronted you and told you how
shitty it is to toy with these girls oh how could you do this to these
two sweet girls and then you got scared and felt guilty and knew,
just knew that I would do anything to convince you to love me,
to talk to me, to forego your guilt and embrace me so then
you planned the ultimate goodbye, the goodbye that would seal
all other goodbyes, a goodbye that would restrict me
from ever even attempting to find you, a goodbye that you knew
I’d question like this - shamefully, quietly - but feel so disgusted
with myself upon asking the question I mean he has a mourning
fiancé, no one is evil enough to fake that how could you even think
that which would lead me to box up this confusion, frustration,
and inquiry and convert it into grief. But the ultimate conundrum
is this: You never had form. Not in life nor death. I was never able
to touch you, hug you, fill myself with you on a bed, in a space.
But I dreamt of it, and that felt real. You were a dream person
with Dream Form, far from tangibility. So what is this talk
of Death? I cannot confirm it. To Die implies a decayed body,
something rotting. But I never met something fresh to begin with.


4. Everything That Happened, In One Stupid Haiku




5. Ghosts Are Not Real and Other Truths


Apocalypse is getting a text
from an unknown number, from
an unknown girl named Mira,
some girl you imagine to be brown-
haired and fairy-looking, a text
you receive at the beginning of August
on the most beautiful day of the summer
while out with your boss, the one
who snorts cocaine and stole
your brother’s expensive sneakers
when he stayed in your apartment
that one night, stumbling in
at 2 AM, your dog barking,

Nick on the call asking who’s that?

The text says Hi I have some bad news. The text
says This is the Apocalypse. The text says leave
your boss at the lunch table in the West Village
confused, fork-full of salmon in his mouth. The text
says run to the nearest subway station, try
to remember how to get home. The second text
comes, and the instructions are laid out for you:

The bomb shelter is the Times Square station, which you stumble
into, tears running down your face. You sit on the platform. Trains
brush past you. You consider falling into the path of one, of ending
it before It can end you. It is, after all, the end of It all. But you cannot
think, you cannot think past whatever you are thinking in that moment.
You have always considered yourself past pain, so post-pained that even
suicide was too painless for you. You had a gusto about it. Prideful, it’s too
much effort. But you could do it, in that moment. In that moment you felt
like you could stay in that position forever, sit there on the platform crying
forever until everyone was safe inside of their shelters or in their airplanes
to the Moon, everyone safe and no one there to run the train lines, no one
there to take you home. You leave a voicemail for your therapist because it
is Friday night and she doesn’t pick up calls from clients on Friday nights:

Oh god please call me back something very bad is happening

In the aftermath of the downfall, you walk home sullen
in the dark of the city. You have fifteen missed calls
from your mother. She is probably wondering
if you have survived the plague, the hurricane,
the earthquake, or whatever it was. She is probably huddled
in some corner of the apartment, your dog Snowball
shaking at her feet. You walk fifty blocks.

The idea of taking the train home makes you retch
on the sidewalk. Everything is rubble and bones
litter the streets. Taxis rush past you with broken
rearview mirrors, smashed glass. You keep replaying
this one image in your head: Calling Nick, hands
wobbly.  Calling out weakly, Hello? No, the man
on the line says, his voice full of Nick. This is his dad,
the man says. You have a vague idea, then,
of what is real and what is not.


6. Sutra


I have developed a circular strategy in ingesting this loss. I think of it all cyclically, as if it were some divine act, something that repeats, turns in on itself, turns inside out and then out one more time. I fell in love with a code, the numbers lulling me into submission, lulling me to love the curvature of the 2, the sharpness of the 7. I fell in love with shitty, 2000s era Tinder pictures, a boy in a Sonic Youth Tee holding out a blunt and whipping out a peace sign. Chats do not go away. They try to tell you that in school, that what is online cannot be undone. I cannot grieve what still exists, and yet also what never really even existed. I have evidence of its legitimacy, though: missed calls, voicemails, texts with small red hearts in them, a tattoo of a name. But I must have known that in every version of this, in every iteration of the now, this thing dies. Nick, I laid in the you and the “what if”. But I refused to move, and I should have. We should have Met Up. We should have Kissed. Those things are Real. In general, this is what always happens, and this is what was always going to happen.

But not an actual death. Not a Real Person, live, living and breathing, did it ever occur to me that you were out there, actually heaving in and out air, someone who drives a car and eats lunch and plays with his daughter and watches the news? dead on a Friday morning. I didn’t know that was possible. You were always just a blurb, some shape-shifting thing, a secret locked away on my phone: something revered, something to be embarrassed about, something my mind went to before falling asleep. I didn’t know fantasies died like this, with so much nothing and I didn’t know fantasies could turn into ash in an urn, sitting on a mantle. What happened to the fingernails? It perplexes me. Are they in the urn? Do nails burn? How could you fit into something so small? How could you fit into anything, for that matter? For me, you were always too big to be contained. You trespassed form, you were something matter-less, you were something omniscient hanging in the clouds and fingering me under restaurant tables. The fallacy of my fantasy is that I constantly and consistently hoped for it, wished for it to become real. Now it is, and I wish it wasn’t. And I cannot do it again. I cannot pretend, I cannot wistfully stare out of the window and imagine us meeting for the first time: me in a yellow dress, red lipstick, you, in a pair of dusty jeans and a flannel. You buy me coffee, we talk, we feel so excited and jittery. Everything is bursting.

I call you one day, a month after your death. I leave a voicemail. I feel bad calling. I wonder if your dad still has your phone. I do not want to be a burden. I am just the silly Internet girl; I bear no relevance to the situation. The phone rings and rings and then prompts me to say something. It felt so natural to leave you a voicemail. I could almost convince myself for a second that you’d open it up the next day and smile upon hearing my voice.