I heard you’re living in that loft above the empty gallery in garfield. That’s not far from me, some I’m sure you’ve seen me. I’ve got a feeling like you’re up there watching over me, but I spend my time looking at my feet. I recognize a coat laying on the sidewalk. A coat I distinctly remember having folded up in the back seat of my car for years because you insisted you wanted it back. A sort of creamy tweed thing with a collar that pulled up above the ears if you wanted to be warm but looking sort of foolish. I couldn't look at you wearing that coat with the collar pulled up and not laugh. You couldn't look at me laughing and not laugh. We are giggling idiots. It’s clearly made for a person who either does or does not take themselves too seriously. You are more or less both. And so this coat fits you best. Someone with a distorted face is taking things from the back seat of a running car and stuffing them into the trashcan on the street. Jamming through the small hole designed for cups and chip wrappers. I ask them where they'd found the things, but their words are underwater or on the other side of a thick wall. They just point to Uncle Donny's frosty window. I recognize some other things in the trash can and start digging. Old note books and clothes mostly. That ridiculous white feathery, faux-fur coat I saw from the corner of my eye when I saw you last from across the street and I knew it was you, but told myself it wasn't. In a swarming crowd, in a random second, in the dim of street light, everything else gone February dark. I looked over my shoulder and you looked over your shoulder and our eyes were caught up on each other and our stomachs sank or were suddenly full of pterodactyls like I used to say or you used to say or like we used to say. I can't remember. That’s how I knew it was. Beneath that feeling, beneath that coat, I unearth a strange wooden box. I open it looking to see if it was the ring I gave you. A ring I would never ever give you now. Not because I don't love you, but because that stone lacked any sense of understanding of the mashing of the deep and discordant love we'd come to know and share at a distance forever or closer in some other dimension where we chose to be less selfish, where we either recant or never said or forgot all the awful things we'd learn to say; where we'd still kiss all the intricate ingrown hair-sized nuances and secrets; where you're always picking flowers on the side of the road and I am always smiling from the driver's seat saying I love you. I love you. I fucking love you so much; where you're always certain and I'm never ever cynical or self loathing; where we'd never know just how awfully casual the nature of falling in and out of each other really is. That emerald would never live up to our obsidian to our garnet to our ruby to our pearl. No stone could touch our wisdom teeth; better out than in; still bloody, dipped in varnish and fixed to gold, my roots long enough to be made a band for your tiny fingers. Your roots too short for my thick fingers. Your roots dissolving. Your tooth trapped in time, half forgotten dipped in resin, floating in formaldehyde in a vial in the unmentionables compartment of a vintage suitcase in my closet in my bedroom far away. The thing. That thing in the box. It wasn't the emerald wrapped in silver I thought it to be but some kind of metal testing kit. It was just an engraved plate of silver fastened to wood with nails and a small tool for testing the softness of metal. I was really looking for anything that was mine you may have thrown away. My favorite t-shirt. Letters. My other favorite t-shirt. My sweatpants. My pillows. Those two books I'd lent against my better judgment: Seamus Heany's Death of a Naturalist. The Bees Make Money in the Lion by Lo-Kwa Mei yen. No luck there. I quickly pass over papers, fingers-crossed and half-cringing my eyes squinting hoping for none of the lofty, treacle and sickening poems I wrote you about your body or our sex. Hoping you burned them long ago. You must have. Thank god. I tear through more clothes, hardly breathing. Fearing what a deep breath of you might do to me. Who it might make me be. Someone hopeless enough to pick up the phone, stupid enough set the world on fire, mad enough to cut my own heart out and place it here bleeding, wrapped in these flowery dresses and things. Silhouettes hang in the doorway though you never really appear. Only the outlines of figures who look sort of like you or at least the way in which I remember you. I am grateful and I keep nothing.