Em Faerman
This Is How the Days & Months Will Pass
The morning he left, you awoke hungry. So open the large pot of bitter-sweet orange marmalade to cover the burnt places on the toast. Despite the meal’s simplicity, serve on grandmother’s china dessert plates. The ones with the tulips, yellow and pink. Leave the matching teacups dormant in the cupboard (he prefers a more obtuse cup of hot, dark coffee). Creep up the open-backed staircase, the runner loose at the topmost tread, letting the door moan when entering to rouse him.
This is how the days and months will pass:
The power of a modern machine carrying you across the causeway, under blue sky, above blue ocean, white clouds and white sails standing in for jutting mountains. The blue sky and blue ocean spanned east-west by bridges opening and closing, north and south, on the hour and half hour or quarter after and quarter ‘til.
Continue until there are no more bridges, until the many shades of blue fade gray. Recall the color of his irises—blue, too—but always more so on the beach than in the cement city.
On the mainland: the bus stops are full and the eateries beyond have not yet opened, tables set and readied the night prior, post-closing, in the almost-morning hours. The riders’ eyes betray the forlorn look of hunger.
How easily you recognize it.
When you reach the empty lot where you first witnessed fireworks, you are almost there. When you stood in the lot he was by your side then. That was early July. Here it is now late August. Accept your affliction: being the kind of person who thinks about buttering toast, spreading marmalade, smoothing out the globules as even as house paint.
In the afternoon: the sweet organic smell of rain. The sky stays dark for what seems like a long, long time (at least until next July, perhaps New Year’s).
You weep.
6 | Psychopomp Magazine