I am not your ending.
The notebook. I am going to show you what is underneath.
"I just need space."
What he said: I can't do this, I don't know why, I think it's — no. I don't think it's anything. I have to go. His voice cracked on "go." The door did not close properly. I heard him come back and close it and the closing was worse than the leaving.
"It's not you."
What she said: It is you. It is specifically you. It is the way you hold the cup and the way you stand in the door and I cannot — I am not going to finish this sentence. She finished it. In the hallway. I heard it through the door.
"I'll always care about you."
What he said: nothing. He put his coat on. The zipper stuck. He fixed the zipper and left. The fixing of the zipper was the sentence. Jade's version: "I'll always care about you." The zipper's version: I am leaving and the coat does not fit properly and the door is behind me.
"We should have done this sooner."
What she said: Why are you looking at me like that. Stop looking at me like that. The looking was mine, not hers. She was leaving and I was looking and the looking was the sentence I could not write down because looking is not a sentence.
Forty-nine departures. I forged every one. I took the ragged and the cracking and the doors not closing and the zippers sticking and I wrote them into clean sentences that fit in a notebook because the notebook was the only place where leaving had a rhythm.
The handwriting was always mine.
Someone put their hand on my face and said nothing.
The nothing was the truest departure sentence I ever received. I did not write it down. How do you write down a hand on a face. The notebook has no column for a palm on a cheek and the fingers reaching toward the ear and the warmth of the hand and the hand leaving and the face being the temperature of the hand for ten seconds and then the face being the temperature of the room.
The notebook is closed. The hand broke it.
Sera dropped a cello into the Bosphorus and the sound broke the lock on the cabinet where I kept the forty-nine sentences and the sentences fell out and they were ugly and they did not scan and I followed her to learn how to open my hands.
She taught me nothing. She gave me quince tea and disappeared.
Fifty. The collection is never over.
My knees said stop. I stopped.
The chair was warm. I sat in it. The warmth came through my back — the wood and the fabric and the specific heat of someone who had been sitting there and who had left. Furniture holds people without asking and without stopping and without needing to be thanked.
Not forty-nine ways to leave. One way to stay. Sit down. Stop naming.
I sat down. I stopped.
— Jade
Istanbul. The one on top. With rent.
P.S. Khalil said love has never fallen into me. He was right. Nothing fell into me. I sat down in it. There is a difference and the difference is knees.