It’s in memorizing the sounds of your vacuum in space. The darkness under the table where my thigh brushes yours. There’s comfort in the cavities on molars 2 and 31, sticky sweetness turned sugar rot. In the gold cap I want to get to protect them, your initials in ringed metal filaments. A permeance to the decomposition of love letters back to paper pulp, somewhere in Italy. Somewhere behind bars. It’s in the closeness of our eyes. Reflected in your black pupils the pale ends of my eyelashes and the ghost pipe rooted there. In the blond bits I paint black when we go out. Perhaps ghost pipe likes the saltiness of my tears the way you like the saltiness of my sweat and I like the saltiness of sea breezes that float by my childhood homes. Ours the halves made whole by alkaline air and some semblance of forgotten awkwardness when you throw your head back to laugh. The softness of your skin. Your joy at proving me wrong again, and again, and again, and so graciously. In the way you tell me you love me, a gentle glance to see if I fell asleep on your collarbone. It’s like you can’t see the frost I wash off my sternum each day. You always reach beyond and find those meadows with new green shoots and the thick scent of spring rain, always just there behind the rib cage, before the endless spinal column. How I regret sleeping then, and waking again, and being so far now. Perhaps I will never come to terms with impermanence as art.