ductile ovenbird It’s hard to love the last few hours before leaving. They are the most precious and the most horrible, steeped in the anticipation of distance which begins to pluck at the threads of my heart, fraying all the edges. Grief takes up residence in my body creating agonizing pressure behind my right eye, a river of pain that travels through my temple, along the tributaries of my arteries, down into my shoulder blade where it pools like a bruise. Once you were so far away that I didn’t know you at all. Now you are close the way thoughts are close, encompassing, embedded. I will stretch my heart into the thinnest wire and let the electricity of every single day move between us. Close means many things and only some of them require bodies side by side. Close is a feeling as much as a description of physical proximity and that feeling can’t be taken. The fact of your being presses into the clenched hinge of my jaw and releases all that’s held there. It spills forth as words. Always words. It’s what I have to heat these brittle bones so I can bend without breaking. 260302 what's it to you? who go blather from