This story has an insightful, direct honesty that says so much in a small space. The powerful imagery stayed with me long after the read.

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They come to me suddenly, swift and unexpected as slaps, the memories do. I live alone now, in an apartment booby-trapped with recollection. Occasionally, I stumble onto an artifact and am blown backwards in time-space. The body remains frozen. Paralyzed. But the mind. Well, the mind tumbles, falls. Suddenly I am somewhere else – a concert, a coffee house, a diner – and he is there, David is, with his sharp nose and irrefutable blue eyes. I see him smile, hear some lilt of conversation. I watch him make circles on the tablecloth with his fork. I watch him scoot forward in his chair. Then, just as suddenly, the molecules of memory dissolve, and I am back, in hard-edged now. The absence of him, a fat, dull headache, pulsates behind my eyes.

Sometimes I get a flash of detail I did not know I noticed. Once it was the swaths of hair on his wrists. Another time it was the way he crossed his arms compulsively – the darkened area in the crux of his elbows.

Today, in the bathroom, a fizz of shaving cream, its sweet, camphoric smell, and I am snatched backwards, into this same bathroom, into a morning two years ago just before the lesions and pneumonia, into a fight, with David. We are yelling at each other, something about eggs, about cracking them or not cracking them on the countertop. It is a ludicrous, nothing fight: a statement turned debate turned argument turned name-calling. I make a show of turning away from him, brushing my teeth vigorously. Humming. He scoops a cloud of shaving crème from his chin and flicks it on my tie. Asshole, I hiss through a mouthful of toothpaste. You're such a fucking asshole. He lowers his eyelids and glowers, a stray dog face – his attempt at a comical apology. Enraged, I look past him, out the bathroom window, at billboards, at the various shadows of buildings, at power lines slicing the sky like razors.

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