All I can do now is point to the cruelties, naming them, making them real. The distance between us is cruel. So are all the things I saw this month that mercilessly remind me of you: fiery red lobsters for sale en la costa, two people clinging onto a dirty motorcycle, the pink-purple sunrise when I’m woken prematurely but cannot drift back to sleep, a pen you gifted me laying on my desk, your latest letter opened like a decaying corpse, Klimt’s “The Kiss,” the empty valleys between my fingers, the piece of clavicle with its phantom hickeys, a stranger who looks like you but only when I don’t
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