The Meadow Annual Literary Arts Journal 2020

What I Left Behind Julie Weiss A playlist of songs we danced to in The Castro, first at the bar where you undressed my barriers like bothersome lingerie. Your painting of a moon goddess, my body gowned in streams of light. The shaggy rug on which I posed in the nude, or nearly. The set of keys you slipped into my pocket at Le Vent d´Armor. Un appartement à Montmartre? I fantasized in wretched French. Yes, there was laughter, once. There were days we doubled over with it for no other reason than spilled coffee or a song sung off-key. In winter, when the last embers had turned to ash, the poems you breathed across my body to keep it aflame. The bedraggled kitten we found trembling in a bush. It was I who carved her gravestone when she died, luxuriously, of old age. The baby clothes we bought, washed, ironed, and folded into drawers then gave away. Blood on tile, the vestige of which never faded. Later, a slew of socks tossed haphazardly around your bedroom, the mismatched colors and patterns a testament to our relationship. I don´t mean the future I glimpsed through kaleidoscope eyes in the days when any place was ideal for lovemaking but whispered conversations wafting on air. I mean scraps of paper with names and numbers. Unfamiliar scents, unfurled silence. 194 The Meadow