What is your favorite cake? I will make it for your birthday.
This item is both amusing and useful, and fits some ideal I have of you in my head. I will buy it for you.
I remember you saying you liked this as part of a larger conversation about an entirely different topic, so I got it for you for Christmas.
I cooked this because I knew you were mad at me, but the presentation is wonderful and I really do love you.
I try to tell you you’re pretty in a different way every day.
I watch this show with you every Saturday, even though I hate it.
I rented this movie because you have a crush on the lead actor.
I made room for your things on the shelf in the bathroom.
I changed the fuses.
I folded your clothes.
I sat outside your work with a book, waiting for you to get out.
I drove you to that wedding and charmed your folks.
I was just watching the faucet dripping for twenty minutes, not moving. I barely blinked. When I sort of came to I just started crying like a little baby, those big weird embarrassing sobs with the extended inhalation, like a siren. I ironed my shirt, still crying. Then it stopped, just like that. A summer storm of misplaced emotion, gone as quickly as it came. I loaded up one of those reusable grocery bags with soup and bread and apples, very 2009, very young, eco-conscious professional looking. I took the train. While standing on the platform, staring down the street, I thought about Philadelphia. I thought about how much emotion I felt, just watching you eat or try on hats. Like my chest was going to break open and some sparkly glitter shit would come pouring out or maybe like I’d just start bawling, those huge wracking sobs with the extended inhalation, like a siren. Just knowing that you were mine. Then I thought about tarragon, rather abstractly. Then I thought about a rock my grandfather used to have on the little nightstand in his bedroom. It wasn’t anything special, some black, smooth volcanic stone, probably two inches long and kind of lumpy looking. It was the most practical paperweight, rescued from obscurity in one of the shrub beds in the apartment complex and given a completely worthwhile, functional role. I thought about dropping it in the ocean, and somehow being able to follow its progress past all the little shoals of feeder fish and reef creatures, past the steam vents and the deoxygenated patches, past the anglerfish and the spider crabs and down into the unfathomable sediment at the bottom (not the very bottom, there are always trenches). Then I went to work.
