Idaho

Perhaps it’s what both their hearts have been wanting all along—to be broken. In order to know that they are whole enough to break.

How easily we come apart. How quickly someone else’s life can enter through the cracks we don’t know are there until this foreign thing is inside of us. We are more porous than we know.

She found solace only in searching for some trace of that other past that would absolve her, or so she thought, by offering some proof of her insignificance.

She felt the waves of her grief collide with the waves of other griefs felt no longer by anyone alive, but carried on the breezes that smelled the same as they had to the people who had suffered those griefs a century ago.

Sometimes she has the feeling that her death won’t matter enough to happen, that she might live forever in this state.

He remembers, again, that home is what he can’t remember.

When you love someone who has died, and her death disappears because you can’t remember it, what you are left with is merely the pain of something unrequited.

He knows his grief, too, but its source is also lost without its movement. It is a static thing, unrecognizable, disconnected.

Pain is as present in his body as his signature is in his hand.

Strange how time was once a thing to measure—hours, days, weeks. How impossible to remember what it must have been like to know a day as a thing that passed.