Retrieve a day from among the years, the assembly of things that make a life, the summers spent in childhood, those winter nights, a man next to you in bed.

Retrieve that day, the one like a wound. Hold it like the hinge it is, the moment before the after. How it is a door that only ever swings one way, and you cannot make it close.

After, your imperfect hands keep hold of nothing, after, your imperfect heart is a sieve, always spilling.

Retrieve the night when, his back against your own, you had listened to his breathing in sleep, retrieve that moon and all those stars, that sky’s velvet blue, how you had wanted him to love you and known he had not.

Retrieve the shape of his face, that way your hand had fit in his, not when you wondered how you would bear too this breaking, the day when for him you would be just a memory.

Something only pulled rarely, if ever, from that box.