Then practice losing farther, losing faster.

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

This is not the flesh that eyes once cut deeply. Loss clots fast the gaping mouth, sings the rough-edged wounds to sleep. I have never before had to wrestle with words. Now it is all that I know how to do. So I seldom write anymore.

Yes, I was born loving deeply. I was born irreverent and wanting. I was born brilliantly, madly, unforgivably undone. But I could never learn to be that way again, so careless and irrepressible and imbued with optimism, lying beside her and looking askance, tracing corrosion in the edges of her eyes, watching their amber turn stale. Every word that spilled from me then, that scattered and shattered and tore across my sight, is foreign now. I am shackled to a past that I reject. Shards of me belong to those I cannot face again. Nothing can withstand a loneliness this profound. I will not be the thing to try.