It was long when he went away. She kept counting down the seconds, waiting for them to change. Time went so slowly she thought she could almost disappear. She remembered the way the pavement felt against her feet, so hot and summered through her sandals, and the night air fading with his outstretched hands.

She could only look at him. She could only feel the sleeves of his coat, brushed over with the pads of her thumbs, her distended belly sandwiched between them and caked in the sunset. There was life between them, movement, lighter than love. He couldn't lift her up as well as before; they would need to wait for that. But while the concrete burned holes in her shoes, she came to know the rough fold of skin between neck and jawline, the nibble of hurried kisses he chose to leave around her nose, even though she had a cold, and the laugh lines of his eyes growing deeper when he smiled at her.

She knew he only smiled at her like that. She tucked her hands beneath his shoulders, wanting him to last forever, knowing he wouldn’t. She always had this dream. She would soon run down the stretch of concrete blocks, passing benches of people, money and popsicle sticks forgotten on the ground. She never knew where he was going, only that he was gone and she was lost to the seconds, the slow pant of ticking moments that drove her out of her mind. She could only wait. That was what she would do.

Because she remembered this feeling all too well, this rise of longing like yeast in the pit of her stomach, the burbling of tears so close to the surface but not yet broken over. He did what he always did - shoved a crumpled picture into her hand. She never knew what it was until she unfolded its crease, and saw that the eyes, the smile staring back at her was her own. The hard bent line came right by her nose, crunching her face in half so that she was her, only less.

This was how he left her: she heard his shoes marking the beats of her heart as he walked away. She saw him turn, saw the line of his mouth shaking just a little, watched the same pink fleshy line as it came back, closer, closer, all the way back to her own, and his matched hers. She felt the heat, the press of his slow kiss around her teeth. There had never been anything better than the closeness of his inevitably wandering tongue rimming her mouth, tasting like mint, like love and home.

This time when he turned, his back bent (he was still so so tall), he did not look back. She knew why; because it was too hard for him too, it was killing him the way it was killing her – or was it? Maybe he had a choice. Maybe he had one like she had had one, only this time she was leaving the choice up to him. It was out of her control now. She had picked once, picked wrong. She couldn’t help noticing how empty her hands were, how the wind blew thick into her coat, surrounding her swollen stomach. Her hands were in knots, like her heart.

She watched him dip up the steps to get on the train. She wanted to run but the pavement had singed her to the spot and it wouldn’t matter anyways. The train crawled, began to beat away down the lines of the road, the thin metal scratches of land and dirt. It was so slow that she had time to think of all the things she could have done. There was enough time for the tears to return and not enough time for them to retreat.

She felt the ache slide down her face, tangible now, visible to strangers. She was a stranger herself. Because he is her world, the only thing in her world that has ever been true, besides the keds on her feet. She is what he knows for sure. He is what she knows, for absolute sure. If there was a perfect equation, such a thing as that, there would be an equals sign hung between them.

There isn't such a thing, she thought.

It is too late.

The sun slunk low, the sky getting dark. She was still in the same spot and he stuck his head out the window, this time to look at her. The burn of his face was the same, the sticky-sweet awfulness of her own sadness mirrored there. He looked like he was losing himself but that he had surrendered to it, that there was nothing else to do, that it might be okay. She watched him breathe and he watched her, his eyes glued to hers, saying everything while saying nothing at all.

They must love each other from afar, or not at all. Her hands ached.

She wakes up and it’s another dream, another dream just like them all, and she knows what she needs to do. She is sweating in her apartment, in her small blue pajamas with the hole in one armpit. The city is blaring behind her, loud even at five in the morning, restless and beating out a steady rhythm.

She almost cannot breathe. She is far away, away from him, but not in the way she keeps imagining. She rises from the clammy sheets, tears a string cheese from the fridge and sits peeling back layers of the skin while she gets her phone out.

She dials and the rings seem to last forever, stretch the airways tight, wear them out. She doesn’t want to wait. When he picks up, his voice caked in sleep and seeming a bit worried, she can breathe. She imagines him in bare feet, leaning over the side of the bed with his eyes still closed. She imagines  that he is beautiful but knows that its the truth.

“Are you okay?”

“Hey,” she whispers, almost breathless, hearing a siren rip up the night. “I love you. I really love you.”

He pauses, confused, and then laughs a little. “Um…is this why you’re calling? I love you too, silly.”

“I just needed you to know,” she says, and she wants to slip through the phone to him. “I’m sorry I made you wait so long.”

Still, he is pulling himself from sleep. “Hey. We’re good now, remember? All in the past.”

She ignores him. She needs him to know. “Let’s not wait anymore.”

“Babe, it’s four in the morning.”

“I don’t care. I want to marry you. I want to marry you right now.”

He laughs. “Okay, so you’re officially crazy. But you know I’d marry you in a second, anywhere, anytime.”

She holds the phone closer. “Let’s do it.”

She doesn’t care about anything else now because she is awake, and so is he. She imagines his face clear as anything, eating her cheese and crouched on the counter. She wants a ring on her empty finger and she wants to make him hers so that she can stop this senseless wonder of how they got there and what they were before and just be. Just be, with him.

She wants to know that she'll never have to watch him disappear.

Based on his voice tickling in her ear, as she pulls him closer with his sleepy sentences, feeling the love of his invisible breath, she knows for sure:

He’s not going anywhere.

And if he is, she’s coming with him.