A kiss on each cheek and we leave each other, and my mind, which kept vaulting into the future in our last encounter, can only think about this moment, how much quieter it feels than I expected.

The anticipation of a climax seemed to kill it, or maybe it wasn’t ever meant to be like that. People always say that, despite the distance, you can always pick up where you left off, but that started to seem sad to me too, to have a relation frozen in time, relegated to an eternal catching up, whereas I always thought it should be that we were always pushing forward to something new, even if the motion at some point became asymptotic rather than truly accessing a further field of possibility. I’d thought our final encounter might be tear-worthy, that I might be overcome, or I’d have more to say, but the speech I kept writing in my head never cohered. The only thing I could fully register was a muted pang over no longer being able to hold on to the image that at all times we were both bumbling around the city, sometimes together, sometimes separately, but always in the same vicinity.