I lay weakly on the couch until my mother sits next to me. She is picking you apart like an old blanket with loose threads that I cannot dispose of, a childish insistence on the warmth it still brings me. My dog eyes me from across every room and flinches at the slightest warble. She tastes your name in the salt she licks off my face. You once said the shape of my eyes was the most beautiful you had ever seen. I wonder if you would say the same now, when they are sore and deformed and glassy at the sight of our old photos. I flip through them, artifacts of a blissful ignorance and lingering doubts swallowed down a tightening throat. What warms it is the tea we once drank. Shared a glass, steeped for hours. It's packaged in a box of 20 bags; I open the cinnamon flavor— your favorite— defeated that you're right. This one tastes the best. Yet it joins many other moments I want to tell you about but no longer can: Confessions, secrets, letters unsent, either withheld by me or pushed away by you, shelved in the crevice of a bleeding heart. It will learn to live again and unlearn the cadence of your voice but the dust in the shelves will remain. The beginning, the beginning was always magic, before you gave me the knife and pointed where it would hurt you the most and I loaded a bullet into your gun believing you would never shoot but I lay weakly on the couch. My knife is still in the sheath.