Message: Ik it’s normal that people grow apart but I feel like it’s not registering in my mind that some of my closest friends a year ago aren’t close with me anymore

Made the bed, fluffed the pillows; Same day I got

evicted

All that nervous typing while crying

had me sleepless, so

I laid out all my weapons

Spread them on the duvet

And thought I'd pick one from the pile

to surprise you—Butter the bread you'd all

forgotten about

But I left a note instead

Imagined having to read it to a room

Full of our dull, excellent moments

Lives, careers, children, lovers; exiled

Moving on from imaginary

And into the hideous, lucid last words

I don't remember you ever saying to me

I’m sorry, it was

just the way it happened.

Hiding in the recesses of memory

is when we all snuck into the cinema, drunk; Pearl

slumped over in the fold-out chair

Laughing from behind her teeth

Sweet Jeanine playing with the plastic end of

her shoelace, sweet Jeanine

Who I haven’t seen in nine months—

Watching each other for needs, for wants

A hazy, serene sort of love

Growing in spades. Passing through the continent

—Regular churchgoers, if the steeple

had been four-walled bathroom stalls

If God had been

humble enough to let us have this

one easy, precious thing

Back at the house you kicked me out of

Not on purpose, not

by some preordained design. Naturally

I left behind the bracelet

You gave to me a long time ago, remembered you

All saved up enough money to buy it

I put the weapons—My pen, the preacher,

Marina's bow and your arrow—back

where they belonged

Closed the curtains, washed the sheets

Hung them out to dry

Like it took nothing, like

Packing up my life took the

Stoic stupidity of a saint—Our life reduced to

Searching for proof in a memory of

just the way it happened