As I write this, she’s waiting for the red eye. I wish I could say that she’s leaving me forever, as Dad used to say about my Uncle in jail, “out of life, out of mind.” But nothing’s definite, definitive, finite on this annoying planet. We might be fucking in a week.

We looked at each others’ hands before we left, mine flat and ready-to-be crinkled, like a new map, hers rough as a shark fin. She called me a new soul. She said she was a teacup that’d been broken over and over again, repaired each time, never truly whole.

We never talked about the old man. Why music made us sad. Sex, about us and sex. Forbidden fruits. I never told her what she meant.