Midnight spaghetti.

In your absence I've returned to some of my old habits. Coming home to a sleeping, disquiet house, stumbling and burping and singing the Pixies off-key in the empty kitchen, dancing with frozen feet on the wet tiles, huddled and rubbing my hands together over the pot of boiling water. Just a few drops of olive oil, and then I delight, stoned out of my mind, at how they dance and converge and separate again.They are like amoebas. We are like amoebas. We are all from one singular nothing. Return me to me this blissful simplicity: spinning drops of olive oil in a Teflon-coated pot of boiling water. . . .

But I am not completely alone without you, my dear. He keeps me, for the most part. While I'm eating over the stove, he's threading between my legs, purring loudly, and biting at my jeans to mark his territory. Eventually I must succumb to his demands, and we climb up the stairs to my bedroom, and slam into the wall - grabbing at the air after an involuntary "ouch!"

What looks will the morning bring? What blood-shot eyes part and widen when the trumpet sounds at sunrise from the humming, coughing, hacking bathroom? There is no sleep to be had anywhere in this house. My bed is shared with him, and his nocturnal wont for arbitrary kicking and clawing. Loneliness is a thumping bass drum, a closed door framed in pale luminescence. Love is an arm deprived of its blood, ticklish hair that stays in your nose, and stifled giggles in the quiet night. I fit somewhere in the middle, in a closet between the two.