The cigarettes tasted like cocaine in the back of your throat and you thought to yourself, Was that a dream?




And now you're stuck with those pictures of her on your computer. Pictures you'll never delete because they are slick fingers that slip inside the valves of your heart and pinch that nerve. You think about the love letters you saw, slippery and unnecessarily serifed in their Cyrillic. How you attempted to translate them but gave up when you realized they didn't mean anything when run through the algorithms like that.

Matthew and Luke each, separately, made you breakfast in bed, and John sang to you. Mark put his hands on your hipbones and lifted you up onto the kitchen counter, stood between your legs and looked you in the eye. They all made dinner; they all rode the train to see you; they all bit your earlobe. The only one who ever read a word you wrote was Peter, and he hated you for it. You stopped writing. David slipped his hands into your sternum and, with grace, he butterflied you. Afterwards his hands were coated in a shining film of gore, and he wiped them on your inner thighs- no big deal. All he wanted to do watch your heart beat; you didn't have the wherewithal to tell him it was more beautiful when heard across oceans.