Heated air slipped in between my shoulder blades as he sauntered down my spine. The smell of grapes and sterility soared up into my right nostril, leaving my left empty and cold. He hurried down my legs, leaving the scorched letters of a non-existent love story that read from right to left down my calves. He left my heart pumping itself to death, bleeding its life through my snaking veins. But he left himself there, accidently letting himself grow where everyone told him not to. He forgot himself, and left something he shouldn’t have. My feet were calloused and cracked, but he softened them and filled in their many cracks. He found me lying very low, sitting close to zero. He left me lying nearer to -0; somewhere that I had never expected to be, but somehow I got swept up in a mess so big I got left behind in unreality.

He drew me in by amazement; I caught him dividing by zero, something few had ever attempted. I had always been told it was impossible, but he proved me wrong as I watched. He snuck around reality, fooling authority again and again. He showed me that right was not always true, and left me with a hunger for unreal knowledge. He taught me that 2+2 does not always equal 4. He left me lying in here with his forgotten signature, in purgatory. He left me with her.

I was even more ignorant than the authority, allowing him to seduce me into blind submission. I began sealing my lips off with cheap wine, which I had never done before I met him. I became one of them; playing with fire and ice together, without putting the fire out or melting the ice. But now, it’s nothing more than an interesting party trick, because once he left all my need slipped out with him. He was my magic, really, and now I have nothing (lies). Now I am just a soul in limbo.

He left me by my lips, his goodbyes and hellos were laced with the bitter sweet taste of alcohol. I was heated to immobility, grasping at the newfound senses that he provided. But he had stolen it, licking it up from my teeth as he kissed me goodbye. He built me up for himself, and I feasted upon his scheming ways. He multiplied me, added me up to infinity before pulling forth my square roots, leaving me with one. But when he departed, he left his signature. She curled herself around inside my middle, making me a 1.5.


When the end of 18,140,000 seconds came and went, slower than I could ever think it to be, it diminished into eighteen hours. Eighteen grueling hours of strangers and intrusions and needles were diminished into the five minutes that would change everything. The five minutes that separated him from myself forever and ever; he was out of me now, and I was no longer 1.5, but 1. I counted her phalanges, from one to ten and from ten to twenty. I wrapped my life with a 3’ by 4’ pink blanket. And then we rode 12 miles home, driven by the need for her.

I will thrive without his magic; now I have her, and she is magic even more powerful than his. I know this new magic is more important than the loss of his because I feel for her what I never felt for him.
He came and he went, before I even managed to change my identity to match his. He had dissipated before I could tell him he forgot his signature; that he now had something to stay for. I was left with this half, this part of him that would determine the rest of my life no matter what I did with it. I had to make decisions about magic without any magic of my own, and that proved almost as impossible as dividing by zero. I didn’t do what everyone expected me to do. I kept the .5, building it up so that its magic rivaled his.