You're not a fan of abstraction, you never have been. You were always better with the things you could get your hands on, work with. Things you could see as they changed and, as they changed, they affected you. (She thinks that's why you weren't really a fan of college. You think you were just a slob who didn't care enough to do the work and were far more curious about finding that elusive limit to hit that would actually have a bigger effect than slight annoyance)

But now night is coming and the space around you is echoing in that way you know so well, of silence fractured by the loud thoughts in your head, ghosts spanning years and all the worst canned worms spilling through it (every shade of every mistake you ever made is carnivorous, it eats at you and it would be so funny how you destroy your own happiness like this. You're your worst enemy, you poor scared asshole, you coward)- and now… now you have to live with abstraction. You have to learn love as abstraction where before it was two bodies in the same bed. You wait the on-setting fever of exhaustion with dread.

You know there will be no sleep. That's not why you're here. There can be no rest when your chest is buzzing like a beehive and your hideous thoughts keep advancing like the army of the dead. Step by step, you wade through catastrophe and you know even though you can't let yourself feel it yet, that this is destruction, in you, around you. So you sit on the edge of that bed and try to pry apart the silence of a hollow space from the absence of the sounds she used to make tiptoeing around it.

Of course you think about her, you can't escape it. Your head is incessant. You hands are sweating, your eyes burn but you think about her so hard you wonder if you could call her into being just this one way.

You know you can't. (the dead would have risen long ago to be by your side if you could call back everyone you've lost just by the sheer force of loving them, missing them)

You must embrace abstraction instead. This foreignness you never took to. You must embrace the idea of rest, the idea of silence. The idea of her. Leaving. (you shattered something beautiful with your own hands – they bleed of it, but all you want is the shards to go deeper)

Does it hurt?

(not enough. not enough. not enough. not enou/