It was the way everything was ending. The way everything was over before I could fully appreciate the beauty of it all. The lights, the stage, the audience, the way they hung on every word. Over. Time to return to the underlying hum of the everyday.

I stood in the hotel room for the last time. The weeks and months spinning around me like the color of old paper and I breathed in every dust mote. I tried to grasp every emotion that had made me want to write and share in the first place. I had written a novel. I had written a novel that people wanted to read. I had written a novel that people wanted to read and I taken it on a tour. And people had come to listen as I gave voice to my own words. They had stepped up to tables with the book cradled to their chest like a precious memory and I had listened as they gave my words a new voice. Listened as they told me how the story had moved them to tears. How it had settled into their bones and inspired them to make something of their own. To create something with their hands. To put their own piece of something out to the world. I had hugged them, held their hands, wiped away tears, watched their eyes light up when they talked about their own art. I had seen their art for myself. Carried carefully in folders and notebooks and read from screens. And I had cheered on every one. From the shockingly bad to the earth shattering good. Each one was a masterpiece and an homage to my own work, which I had only dreamed would light a spark when I was alone in a dark room with only the words to guide me.

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We once drank starlight from fluted champaign glasses, on a balcony overlooking the lives of ten million people. We poured love into each other’s ears and let the sheets pool onto the floor as the streetlights threw shadows over bare skin. We drank black coffee at midnight and ate toast over the Sunday crossword, laughing when we could only fill in a third of the squares. I wrote poetry on his palm in purple ink so he could put me in his pocket when his hands got cold on the corner waiting for the bus. He felt like forever until the morning I clearly heard him say, “I wish you would just shut the fuck up so I can tell you goodbye.”

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