by Jason Grant
The entire king-sized bed is mine now, but I can’t seem to move from the left side to the right because on the nights you were here—laying there—if I dared move from my side to yours in the middle of the night it was like I-was-crossing-some-boundary you-needed to sleep. Always, just outside of my reach. There’s good with the bad, but I think you only understood that when I lit Amari candles so our shadows could merge on the grayish blue wall behind the headboard (something Carl Jung probably would have been proud of)—amorphous—while dancing to the ever-changing metronome you let me control, like tic, toc. Tic. Tic. Talking about a lot of things afterward, usually, until finally we’d agree it was best to stop. It was best for me to make you chamomile tea. So now I’m standing in front of the stovetop, listening to the teapot scream and I can’t help but think of you and how much you used to love saying my name. I don’t want to go back to bed. There aren’t any candles lit.