I will wait until your quiet makes me remember I am waiting.

She could not talk for a day, for a project she was doing for some damn class. She would make cute wincing faces every time I could tell she thought of something to say.

The hardest part of losing is the sense that you have been silenced, and it matters not that in this case, literally, I was. I threatened not to speak to him again and he dared me this time to do it.

I will call him. Sometime. He could be reading this. I don't withhold my words for lack of love. I want to be kind to him, and I want him to be kind to me. That not impossible. I operate on the painfully optimistic assumption that as the weather improves, it will get possible. Also, I want to be a better person when I see him again. I know he would laugh to hear me say that, but it's true.

Our memories are very convenient. They tell us what to want. I think of right things and he thinks of wrong things we did for each other. I guess I have to respect the gap in wants.

(Though I don't want to, not even slightly.)

I am writing down the pretty things I see and think. He may not have an interest in pretty things I see anymore but someday it will amount to a letter, and I hope to know what to do when I send it. If he tears it up, then I will know something, and if he does something else I will know something else to do. For us. About us.

Our memories are convenient. Once I complained that my feet were freezing; I tucked one underneath me and he covered the other with his hand, and my favorite part was not the fact that my foot warmed up immediately but that he didn't act like he was doing me a mad favor. Most guys would have said, "How about this?" He didn't say anything. I still, perhaps irrationally, assume there was more of him in that gesture than in the fact that lately he can't meet my eyes. I want to be right.

Look for me when I am gone. You will know me by the blue of the paint on my skin and the crimson of blood in my ash. You will know my look for the loss, black and holy on my brow and fingers, streaked, smearing stains against deep-set charcoal eyes that will never forget.

After all, my body looks just like my work.

I will look for you when I am gone, and whereas you will never find me here, I will uncover you in every dream. Hiding one more flight of stairs away, higher and lighter in the distance, I will look for you like a ghost. I will look for you in all of the crevices of thought and push you out. I will.

Do not remember me this way.

I will look for you in all of the places I will go and see you behind the shadow of a man who wears your haircut, or who never has a jacket in the rain. I will see you in between the drops of rain. I will look for you beside broken panes of glass on winter days cut by wind, and though I look away, the next time I am peering back there you will once again be there, hidden in dust and smoke and the pain of all of these years spent, lost, without ever finding – caught in rainbows.

We came to this place seeking the same thing.

You will not remember me at all.

Look for me between the pages of the journal I keep that I will never show to you, where I have kept alive every strange moment I have chosen no longer to dwell on -- every thought of you and of how much I would have loved to love you if I could. You will never be who I thought you might, my dear. Look for me and you will know me. You will see me as the one before you dressed in an infinite dream of return; you will see me in a painting, behind your window, below the stair. Look for me and you will know me. You will know me by those colors, deep and bold, of the heart you never knew.

Look for me when I am gone: You will know me because I will be looking for you.