how to photograph an ending
Patchwork
There was a story about a man who’d left his heart unlocked one day and then everything had fallen out and when he went to put it all together again he couldn’t quite remember what order it had all gone in so he grabbed it all and stitched it together with sidewalk cracks and he used squares of torn jean and the tops of fence posts and a few puffs of cloud where he had lost a few of the pieces and for years passersby would still find small pieces of his heart here and there that would end up tacked to the refrigerator or tied in with shoelaces or brought as show and tell in first grade classrooms so when she asked if I’d made the mug like that on purpose so the man faced in towards her I lied yes and later she said that the mug melted one day while she was drinking tea in it first the pine cone sticker that I had my mom send from california curled and lifted away then the photo of thailand scraped off and next the glitter and the glue all mixed together with dirt from fingers lifted in globs like anchors and peeled like dead skin and it was only a matter of time before the man with his patchwork heart fell away too and shattered on the ground and in that moment each person who had collected a piece felt their own small portion, almost unnoticeably, skip a beat.
Honey
She visited in november and she ate a spoonful of honey every day from a little tupperware container and when I could have died because her body was so smooth she got out of bed to spoon honey and she didn’t look at me and I was restless and my bones buzzed and turned sickening sweet and when she left my room felt empty and I couldn’t see the walls they were so far away and bobbing on the waves in the middle I found her little container of honey and there wasn’t a spoonful left but I had nothing else to do so I licked it clean and then forgot her except for the fact that I’ve cried honey for months now.
Forest
I couldn’t even tell you what my first love was if you asked but it might have been the smell of a forest or the feeling of digging my toes into our house’s crimson carpet heated in patches by the sun or it could have been a sandbox and maybe each love is only a repetition of the one that came before it and I’ve never lost any because new ones have blown in swirls and eddies to fill the empty spaces so while I’m waiting I tell myself she was nothing new just my old river dressed in human skin or the big dipper disguised as the Tuolumne or a collection of beads pretending to be stars and I remember now that sometimes her hair had smelled of damp wood.
