The lock and the key

You change, he changes; maybe it was this way, always.

When it’s over you can never quite remember how you ended up all alone again. Where you began, and he ended. The slippery jagged parts in between.

You can’t recall the precise details, the slivered daggers of the exchange: you are left with the bloodied hands of one who has hit unfairly and without impunity. It feels dirty; it feels raw. But at least you feel.

And then one day you can't remember the smell of his workout t-shirt, much less why you fell so hard in the first place. Your murmuring dialogue, your witty repartee, they exist nowhere- they are ghostlike- party to only your wandering, singular, and desparately alone mind.

But sometimes, just in a wondrous, heartbreaking moment, you remember his long slender fingers on the piano, or his devilish smile, or the night you went skinnydipping (twice), and discovered a magical forest coming alive at dawn. But these, like all precious things, become fewer and farther in between.

And somehow that sweat-stained tshirt is (somehow) locked in the chest underneath your bed: that prized relic, that cherished memory.