The Diamond That Left Behind

I never wrote you the goodbye I owed you. I let the silence carry it the way I used to let you carry me. I am writing now, late, not because you asked but because what I broke keeps asking inside me. You arrived like morning fog. That’s what I called you in a poem you may still have. Soft. Steady. Unavoidable. I was the king of heats. You were the kind of person who held fragile things without breaking them. You knew that under it all I was the fragile one. You held me anyway. You warmed the bed with my own heat, your body cold from Riga, mine a small fire from the south. You said I burned a little and held me through the night like coming home. I had a country in you. I had a country I could rest in. I had a place where I was allowed just to exist. And then one morning I could not see the next morning. There was no fight. There was no other man. There was just the disappearance of the future inside my chest. I ended it with my mouth. You did not deserve a mouth that small. You went back west. I kept the city. It no longer felt like mine. We still write. The words have flattened. What used to mean a hundred private things now means exactly what it says. It is a small starvation I do not know how to feed. I miss the messages that came before your face. I miss the hours of FaceTime, your voice closer than any room. I miss the way you walked Dublin as if your body knew the shape of return and I, who came from a country of sun, followed your hand through the rain. I had it all. I am certain I had it all. And I cannot tell you why I left. I have asked myself the question in every language I know and none of them will give it back. You held me like someone who knew what to do with fragile things. And I, who was the fragile thing, broke us anyway. Perdóname. Fuiste mi descanso. Y aún no sé por qué me fui. (Forgive me. You were my rest. And I still don’t know why I left.)