One Last Soliloquy And Also Can I Keep The Blender?

Illustration by Gina Ledor

In the days before we move, you comment that the apartment could have used some more greenery. In the days before we decided to move you threw an empty vase at the back of my head and asked why I never bought you flowers. I can imagine what the now-empty apartment would’ve looked like without you, and it’s less green. We of course don’t both need to move out, but I think it’s that, the lingering memory of what had the potential to be mint or pine or chartreuse, that makes it necessary. You have a gap in your teeth that you like to pretend is because your mother had a gap in her teeth, but really it’s from a bike accident. There’s a scar along your clavicle from that same injury. I’ve kissed it against the kitchen sink, where all we needed to waltz around the island was the sizzle of oil in a skillet. In the bathroom where our toothbrushes slanted toward each other like sweethearts. There’d been a time where I would've asked the sun to stop setting if it meant that your flowers would bloom more easily. I suppose I could source a bouquet now, but there’s three stitches at my nape where the glass slit my skin. I could still buy you flowers. We would sink into the tête-à-tête that neither of us is keeping and clasp hands over the separation. I would plant you a garden. When my cut heals you would press your lips to that place, warm against the cool of my necklace.

I could say that you never bought me flowers, but instead, here is a poem that reads like the flowers I may have given you might have smelled. Love is not forever, but again and again.