went to the bathroom to see if there was anything going on with my face. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and registered the discrepancy between how I had looked last afternoon and how I looked now. In this way I measured the amount of life that had been extracted from me by loving someone, in person, face-to-face. I gauged the minus value by the dullness of my skin, the streaky, patchy black around my left eye, the miscellaneous redness that came from rubbing my face against C’s stubble as it increased in length and bristliness hour after hour.
