A Cenotaph

<b>Extract<br/></b><br/>It was just the three of us inside the exclusion zone in the end.<br/><br/>We were sick enough by then to be certain that leaving wouldn’t mean much, and that staying might mean something to those on the outside. That wasn’t how you saw it; I am sure of that. You stayed because you were fascinated. You stayed because you were petrified. Made petric, turned stone. Or maybe you and I were stone all along, maybe it was pulled out of us like a pit from a peach.<br/><br/>×××<br/><br/>I know better than to say that this had a beginning. I know that every layer is marked with something that came before, is yielding to something that came after, circles back on itself. It goes like this; I loved you. I love you. This gives me somewhere to start from.<br/><br/>It happened in pieces and glimpses. You were a bricolage, stitched together into something that fluttered, always, somewhere behind my eyes. The chordophone trill of your office chair as you rocked your way through afternoons filled with unsolvable problems, the slow collection of steam darkening your sleeve when you sat across from me on coffee breaks, fingers laced together underneath your chin, the worn streak on the carpet that looped from the door to your desk to mine and back again, a patina you would navigate in systole and diastole pulses.