The doctor asks me to point to the sadness scale on the wall
to demonstrate how much I miss you, 1 being the lowest:
fine and dandy. I put my finger over the 10, the one that stands for
I want to find the nearest bridge
and jump off it.
He taps my knee with the hammer.
Instead, my heart is the one that responds.
My mother once told me that I learned to walk before crawling,
that I would stumble through doorways, through kitchens,
through neighbors’ gardens, sleepwalking at night,
stacking their books neatly in the sink,
leaving plates spilling from the living room shelves.
Now, 13 and a half years later, I begin to wonder
whether Death has a living room, and if he has nicknamed it
the dying room instead.
The moon only rises on the nights when I call up the suicide hotline
to say hello. They know my first, middle, and last name by heart.
I ask for Laura, the one whose voice sounds like a mixture of honey and gravel.
What’s wrong today? she asks.
I forgot how to live, I respond.
On the other end of the line, her soft breathing,
the miles and miles of wire stretching between us,
cigarettes on some faraway street being lit
between cupped hands, an exhale in the night,
two naked bodies spooned together like two halves of an orange,
and through it all Laura’s pauses are busy forming constellations,
the kind that drowning men hang above their beds.