"...in the morning of my day, very unlike your morning and very like it, stilll, i take my ginger tea or my iced coca-cola or, if i am so lucky, my coffee.  i take half of it on the balcony, my toes and fingertips flinching in the too-cold june, and the other half at my desk, ordering the tasks that will fill my day as a blink fills an eye.  in these early hours of my waking life, i am susceptible to memories.  their furtive, curious glances sneak around the edges of my consciousness, mangled from erotic dreams the night before. 

in the kitchen, the first task of my day decided, i wash the stewpot.  i chop the onion, then.  i layer the chicken and potatoes the size of an infant's fist.  i spoon curry powder carefully into the pot, think better of it, and begin dumping it in with abandon.  hot pepper.  cinnamon.  cumin.  salt.  i cube the sweet butter and tuck it in as well.  the cream will go in later.   in six hours this will be thick.  in six hours, a meal.  the kitchen sags under the weight of spice.

it is here, while i am washing down the counters and bagging the trash, that i think of you.  the way you bumble through the house in your morning, a beeline to the coffee pot.  you are gentle.  all the years, not a violent bone to be found in your body and i have searched, oh, i have searched in my freudian way, wanting to be hurt.  you refuse.  you love me, instead.  i think of your body, a furnace between the sheets, thawing the arctic tundra of mine, your warm arm slipped around my waist, my concave to your convex.

at the corner of this moment, a memory of him stands.  shrunken in the cold hall light.  at the top of the stairs, he stands.  i can hear the wind at the window and it whistles through him like a seashell turned in the sand.  empty, forsaken.  i nod softly.  not to him.  i nod to myself.  in the beginning, i wanted him gone.  but i have grown accustomed to his perch, there.  he has shriveled like an apple in the sun, the meat of his meaning curling and rotting out..."