Long after having dwindled to nothingness it can still be found waiting in the wings, grimly intent on any opportunity to speak itself back into existence—even more self-obsessed than some simpering woman giggling about how she’s ruined her figure by getting herself knocked up—and worst of all is the way it drones on, oblivious to the existence of anything outside itself, that tedious voice that gets forgotten so quickly it’s almost embarrassing, its memory fading swifter than the beauty of roses in full bloom. It’s nothing, it was nothing from the first, and later on it was even more nothing. I’m resting my head on M’s chest, listening to the footsteps of the cold, cold rain as it falls on the empty fields, the fields that we drove through to get here. The rustle of dry grass, a wood’s purple shadow streaked across the horizon, the tracks of wild animals, the exposed flesh of a tree where a branch has been cut off, bare feet shocked blue with cold, the seemingly indecipherable slant of M’s damp eyebrows, the rose that grew in M’s aunt’s garden, the two small graves, the garden pond, the stubby apple trees.
