You will try to leave them as you pace the halls for the hundredth time in your pajamas.

You will leave them in a doorway, watch it swing closed behind you. You will leave, and nothing else will open, and still you will leave them, leave them on roads slick with ice as you cover miles upon miles, watching the bare tree branches make scattered the sun, light breaking into smaller light.

You will leave them as the snow blows from the rooftops and buries the yards, as even the tire tracks and rock edgings vanish, leave them in the cold and the white of the winter world, leave them on the hoar rimmed sidewalks, the frost laden mailboxes, leave them on the frozen lakes where not even the geese still roam.

You will leave your ghosts as your breath does you, vanishing into the cool night sky, dissipating beneath stars like some kind of failed and lesser comet, a barely there thing, hardly noticed.

You will get up from that bed, that wide, too empty bed, that rudderless boat-like bed, that bed of not enough bodies, that only partially slept in bed, that bed where you never sleep on the left side of the bed bed, and you will leave them.

In the dark, circling around a kitchen at one a.m., you will leave them.

And maybe this time, they’ll leave you too.