This time last ____

These empty rooms. Their echoing smells, the half-light, and the sleep. It's as if they've forgotten us already, and maybe they have, but we are still there-- the fullness, the nervousness, the meals we cooked but never ate. They linger in our minds, haunting our exhales.

For days we awoke to soft-lidded dawns, telling time by the sunlight on the trees outside. The cold had put all the butterflies to sleep, the tea calmed the ones in my stomach. Repleta. Fingertips stroking arms in conversation, smoothing them over.

The clock stopped soon after, and the phones went, too-- wrapped in a world of blankets, we crossed into waking reveries, the softness of lips, sleeping in knots on trains. But this universe is not our own. Though we created it, we cannot stay here. The clouds and sky grow heavy with the oncoming storm, the weight of all our possible lives collapsing upon us, filling the air with the humid electricity of tears, and the inability to breathe after a night of hollowed-out restless dreams.

Next time, I kept telling you.

Your whispers were always inhales.