kristina marie darling

Without knowing it, we'd started playing the game again. Memory or dream, memory or dream? he asked, not realizing at all how afraid I was.

Half asleep, he would spend hours changing the rules, the way a glacier cleaves to reveal a lake below. The sheet of ice beneath the sheet of ice. Even then, I could barely speak. To mouth words like precipice and shoreline seemed a luxury, not the kind of violence it would later become.





Of course the landscape had clear boundaries, once: the farthest cliffs sketched twice in stone, circled by our small figures in the winter months. Inside his mouth it was always this dark

Most nights, I couldn't tell if he was joking,
not even when he said my name
not even when I asked him to say it—
...

I wanted to record for him the movement of a body in sleep, because I knew it had something to do with the fire:

Darling

At the time, I didn't remember the word for threat, let alone desire, collision, or violence. I barely understood the rules to the game he called Memory or dream? Or why he would trace the edge of the doorframe with the tip of his index finger. This, this was only way to strike the match, he insisted.

And when it was my turn: a knife, a burned paper, a book sent by post. Even now, I spend hours explaining how some of the pages have been lost when none of them were ever there at all.
...

We were no longer in love. The sky, too, was beginning to show its wear. A silk lining could be seen through every slit in the dark green fabric.


I started to wonder where we went wrong. You were holding a map of the constellations. Each of the minor stars had been assigned to a square on a little grid. The map seemed scientific so I approached you.


You kept looking down at your compass. The needle spinning beneath a little screw. Maybe this is where we went wrong.


Above us, the sky is still wearing its green dress. The most delicate strings holding it all in place.
...

After the divorce, after your mistress, after the stars were eclipsed by the bright lights of the city, I gathered all of the broken dishes you'd left behind. I placed each one of them on a little shelf, recorded their height in a dark green book.


I began to realize the significance of this gesture. What is love but a parade of memorable objects, a row of dead butterflies pinned under glass?


You had always loved mementos. Once you'd even rented a small boat to find your missing porcelain statuette.


I started to wonder what other gifts you'd leave behind. The dried insects I'd find in each of your letters.


I closed the cabinet door, counted each piece of shattered glass, and tried to imagine them all in your perfect white hands.
...