Breaking down

I have, for the sake of clarity (though clarity is precisely what continues to elude me), begun keeping a list , no, not a list, that implies completion , a ledger of every conversation that might have meant something. Every glance. Every pause too long or too short. Because surely meaning must hide in ratios: the seconds she lingered before saying my name versus the average time in which one says any name. There must be a pattern. There must be. Yesterday, I rechecked my old notebooks, the ones from before we met. I thought perhaps I could triangulate who I was then, before her laughter started echoing in the kitchen tiles. There’s something about the sound there , the acoustics, yes, but also the way it reverberates longer than it should, as though even the walls are reluctant to let her go. I counted the echoes once. Seven. Always seven. Except on Sundays, when it’s six. I haven’t found the cause. Maybe humidity. Maybe sorrow. Lately, I’ve been breaking things down , not destroying, but dividing. Every recollection into smaller elements: tone, phrasing, breath, light. I separate the gesture from the word, the word from the silence that followed it. If I can understand the parts, perhaps the whole will reveal itself. But the pieces multiply faster than I can name them, and I lose track of which belonged to which moment. When she left, she said it wasn’t about me, which of course means it was, though possibly in the way that gravity is about the apple , a constant force unchosen by either party. Still, I wrote it down: Not about you. I circled it seventeen times. That should make it true, or at least symmetrical. It’s funny , or rather, it should be funny , how much time one can spend arranging memories by weight, like stones. Some sink faster than others. Some refuse to drown. I keep thinking if I could chart everything , the sequence of words, the slope of her handwriting, the moment the air first changed its tone , I’d find the exact second life slipped from living to remembering. But every night, as I go over the data, the columns, the charts, I end up where I began: staring at the empty margin, wondering what to label it. Because that’s where she still exists. In the margin. Between what was said and what might have been meant.