Thursday morning. The cloudy daylight permeates through your window and flutters your eyelids awake. Before you sit up and remember you are alone, you breathe without a hollowed soul. The sheets on the right side are too smooth. Your skin grays to a degree nearly comparable to hers; you retain a minimal vitality. You smooth the sheets on your side to match the region she used to occupy, but heat still circulates under the comforter. It withers from your side and attempts to revive the sleepless left.

When you arrive, the waves’ tumble and the way your rowboat carves the water break the hush of the morning. You time your entrance onto the surface so that foamy, concave forces do not attack you. But your heart still gravitates to the metal box in between your ankles. The repetition of oars breaks you past the impact zone, and you relish your last instant of being unalone.

The moment you think you have achieved an aqueous repose, the water below you shakes into a wave. But you’re not surprised; this ocean holds its name for a deceptive peace.

You wait for a moment before you open the box. You look at a distant line between the frigidity of water and the emptiness of air and you forget its name. All you know is that your world’s focal point has broken down to dust. When a speckle of sun emerges from a cover of clouds, and after it illuminates the passageway between her ashes and the surface of the water, you offer her gray shadow to the tumult of the Pacific.

*
Outside the coffee shop, a pastel world rushes into your retinas. The sky finds a cadence to sway between the hues of afternoon and dusk; although shadows lengthen and light dissipates imperceptibly, you sense an oncoming vivacity that dusk should deliver. You turn a cheek--it’s hosted an ancient battle of growth with stubble as a consequence--toward a wrinkled shoulder. You glance behind you and swear you see the same red curls turn down the block. But they only existed in a different paradigm of moment and setting. Your naked pen rises through your fingers and shakes with a neurasthenic quality, leaving a blue legacy on its white counterpart. When you look down and cannot discern the letters, you watch your free hand clutch the side of the table.

She would’ve known what to do. She would’ve seen your hand and she would’ve seen your ankles interlocking behind the chair leg just so you wouldn’t tumble to the concrete. She could have felt your heart’s increasing density. She would have covered up your knuckles as your blood vessels receded into a state of colorless. If she were here, she would’ve covered your shiver with her exhale. But she isn’t, so she won’t.

Your conspicuous frenzy unsettles you. You sit up and turn your head, this time alarmed, to see how many strangers caught you in this unguarded moment. They would stumble upon your presence while watching the world in their own set of colors. They’d sway their eyes and focus on your left hand, clinging still to the inanimate. They’d exchange creasing mouths and stares that carry enough connotations to not need words.

Your eyes adjust to the dusk. The time that has always brought you starlight now ushers in fire. Because when she was here, she spun the energy you both produced into a brilliant capsule. She threw it into the sky to illuminate your darkest hours and called it astronomy. You felt the magnetism of her hand to yours, and the gravity of your eyes to the night sky, offering light that was too far away to burn.

As the salt welcomed her dust into the water, her soul drifted up to the same sky that, for so long, she lifted her eyes to see. She flew among the stars and decelerated when she reached the capsule that four familiar hands launched the year when time hid undiscovered. Desperate for an infinite presence, she propelled the ignited starlight towards your open palm. Maybe she forgot that absence makes crumbling embers out of hands.

*
The summer after you met, she flew across the Atlantic.
“Six weeks is a long time to miss you,” you had said. You counted a thousand hours.
But now, your clock has broken.