The Nemean Lion.

She was dead and the only thing going through my mind at that point was how I couldn’t figure out how to cry. Instead, the rock that had formed within me at the news crumbled at the way I’d imagined her soul freeing itself violently from gravity. I pictured it flying boundlessly upward, separating at almost the precise moment she’d leapt, finding the highest point in her trajectory motion, and in that one smooth and graceful arc finding that her mortal form was far less lucky —plummeting— thirteen stories straight down. The two pieces of herself had gone their separate ways and once the boulder of that realization had vanished, it left a large hole in the center of me, and I felt like the twisted knots of my childhood trees, with a large hollow center.

I did not want to imagine her mangled body. It did not help me cope, and it only served to ruin the perfect vision I’d conjured of her departure from us, from me. It sometimes grew into envy. That she’d managed to escape us somehow and was laughing in the small ways I found her — in a breeze, a book, the mattress on the floor, too many hours of sleep. Like I’d found God somehow wrapped up in the receipts I used to mark my pages, but could see her grinning tauntingly between the lines. I remember her body perfectly, and how she’d rested against the elements. With tea, with me, with nothing. Just downcast eyes and ageless sighs. I stared at the place from where she’d jumped.

It was from our old apartment window, where she’d spent her final winter mornings with a blanket draped around her tired shoulders and a pocketful of meaningless thoughts and aimless sunrise daydreams. She’d murmur them to me sometimes while I was half asleep, hovering above my shoulders to tell me that even though we were together she still missed me. I did not respond. After a while she’d pick herself up from the mattress to watch the sun ascend from skyline and she’d whisper it all to it instead.

She’d trace their nothingness on the ice that had formed in the corners of the glass, enveloping the wooden frames in an odd Victorian lace embrace, decorating them in finery they did not know in other seasons; disturbed only when she’d carve the patterns to match all of the little tangled bits of herself, scratching at it with her fingernails. She left sharp, jagged lines for the sunlight to make its way through, like that’s the point at which it was answering her. But it made her shudder to watch it melt away, dripping and pooling into her palms, leaving her fingertips cold and wet. Numb.

When we fell in love I'd expected it to be a sudden and dramatic change, something so abrupt that I'd know for certain it was happening. I was going to love her like Independence Day fireworks and we'd launch up in colorful smoke and enrapture everyone in the perfection of our mutual ardor, but it didn't happen that way.

Love, instead, was a slow crawl in my direction and the way I realized I was memorizing her. How she sat and her legs would curl beneath her like a sleeping cat, or how she'd pick at the pages of the books she read and they'd make an odd fluttering sound like a large bee buzzing

—trapped between the screen and the window— and she'd half-read the pages aloud.

Sometimes she would stop to ask me what I thought the writer had intended when they wrote certain passages. She wanted to be a writer, she said, but she told me the only things she knew how to write were letters. She'd write me letters all the time. She'd leave them in my hand when she left in the morning like a kiss, or on the refrigerator door, or in the steam on the mirrors after a shower. She'd even write them when I was sitting right next to her, and I'd talk to her as she wrote.

She'd asked about my favorite color, and I answered "blue" because it was the first thing that came to mind and then all of sudden I found her scribbling furiously on her notepad, stopping altogether at one point to launch into a desperate explanation of why I couldn't pick just one shade of blue because when you said "blue," it didn't just mean blue. It meant all the things that were blue, too. Broken beer bottles on the street corner, early afternoon sky, the ocean, old cars, Gatorade at the gas station, sapphires, the color of her eyes, and even the music. It was the way you feel on a Sunday morning when it's raining or something just as quiet. Or how there's a great big body of water sitting at the bottom of your chest that sometimes drowns everything else. "What if you don't like some of those things?" But I'd assure her that I did, I really did. All of them.