Step, remember, step and hear floorboards speaking with footfalls of voices that carried from above and whisper still in linoleum cracks, walls scored with milestones, cemented in splintering paint, leaded peach she picked in some murky birth year, “I think it was back in 93’ or 04’," back some time, back in some odd year. 

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I made you something to eat. Eat. And the groaning woman fell into the chair and sat, and look, look at me. “You do not know pain like I do.” Look at me, sat and groaned and with eyes elsewhere upon the slowly fracturing seat. 

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Step. Turn the corner. The table is worn with stories littered upon it and burned with the nights where heads rested heavy upon the wood. Hear shouts in the countertop cracks, echoes in emptiness where you were once, in pieces, pieces in books with crumpled pages, pieces in that teddy bear you lost, pieces in that space upon the couch and in broken pencils on the coffee table and in those crooked picture frames. 

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She puts on lipstick. “I’m going.” She looks at herself in the mirror, at the crimson etched upon our lips, into the outlines she bestowed to me and look at me.

 

Turn into chasms within corners and eaves and spaces between memories, through foundations jutting upward from the earth. The door is cracked, gaze in and meet once more that abyss. 

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She was at the doorway look at me hand upon the frame. Empty tenderness upon her lips and close the door go away but do not leave not like that with bitter affection on her lips and bitterness in the arms that held without grasping or longing. In the body that gave her ownership of things huddled behind cracked doors. I will never know pain like hers. She looked, never seeing.

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The child stirs. It knows you in ways your grown voice cannot broach, sits with its head tucked and crouched behind dense shadows and beckons from long dead scenes. And there, you meet the gaze broken by light splintered on the face. Look back and do not see.