YOUR EX-LOVER IS DEAD

try as he might, he’s unable to speak
he grabs her by the hair, he strokes her on the cheek
the bed is unmade, like everything is
dark little heaven at the top of the stairs

take me like that, ruin it all
then build it again by the light in the hall
he drops to his knees, says
“please, my love, please —
I’ll kill who you hate, take off that dress,
you won’t freeze”

one more night
that was a good one
one more night
the end should be a good one

he starts with her back ‘cos that’s what he sees
when she’s breaking his heart,
she still fucks like a tease

release to the sky
look him straight in the eye
and tell him that, now,
that you wish he would die

you’ll never touch him again
so get what you can
bleeding him empty just because he’s a man

so good when it ends
they’ll never be friends
one more night
that’s all they can spend

I did it. He said he knew something had been off since I stopped asking if he’d move to Canada with me. Of course I knew it was improbable, he has a good, well-paying stable job that he enjoys and it would be immeasurably selfish to ask him to move when I’m barely starting out in life. This evening, I packed all my clothes and things that had accumulated at his apartment, and I cried all the way in the cab home. The measure of how much of a good man he is, he called me the cab home, after I’d ended our relationship. Falling in love is easy, but staying in a relationship, it is so much hard work. Breakups are strange. You’ve met each other’s families and your sisters joke about your partner to you. You have to remove the emojis from their name in your phone. What do you do with all the happy posts of each other on social media? Do you archive them, delete them? He was such a good person, and he deserves so much more than what I could give him. When I was younger, I saw my parents split up in the most godawful, hurtful, poisonous way possible, and the one thing I took away from it was, if any of my romantic relationships end, I’d want to know that we can stay friends and that we care for each other, instead of turning against each other. Time to sleep it off. One day at a time, one thing at a time.