I am still splayed out on our kitchen counter like fruit. Each time I pass, I pick through parts for those I want, rummage through fruit flesh like garage sale boxes for what to keep.

Later, I pretend that it’s whole. Pretend it always has been.

Inside of you, all of this stops. Those places that you go curtain voices laughing, faces that come close, moments you miss. The moments pass by you like moths, slip out from between panes of glass as you try press them  together.

You go home and wait to readjust. Turn on lamps and music in different rooms, give yourself the feeling that others are here, have always been here. You even change clothes around to fit the you that lives here: pajamas with soft striped pink socks. The socks feel warm against you and this warmth feels like someone else’s lifeblood rubbing up against yours.

Here, you sit alone in a memory. The loneliness fills your kitchen like candlelight.

What I remember most about baths was afterwards.

Your ritual was to soften my curls with your fingers and towel as they dried in the dim light up our upstairs hallway. You sang me rhymes about mice and pigs running home, tickled my feet and scratched my back.

I knew that no one would ever leave me. I knew that I had this soft blanket placed and lifted, readjusted, over me again and again.

This is where you leave me: tinted sunlight that comes filtered through window bars, dust on floors, overripe fruit, other languages yelled across aisles. I am three feet tall and alone.

I look down diagonally at the sun that comes down diagonally at floor parts, foot parts, me parts. The smell of brown bananas lines the memory.