Love letter # 611

There is a break-up arithmetic. It is an accounting of sorrows, a logging of bruises. As though the tagging of evidence might alter anything. As if the apportioning of blame can dam the flow of blood. This is the useless math of injustice and validation. The numbers say almost nothing about the skin in the game.

From this well of rupture, I plot the graph of a thousand if onlys. The moribund economy of regret and reproach. Things could have gone differently; but they went the way they went, depositing us here.

Correction: me here, you over there. Forever in between.

We passed in the night, left scratches, broke each other’s stuff, and in the naked light of morning there was only sea and sky and the tabulation of loss. Our ships are an archive of scars.

Will they stop us drowning?

Asking this, I catch myself in further calculation. But redundant formulas concoct worthless solutions. So I stop. Lose count.

Now, crystal clear, the answer. Elegant. Emancipating. The grand total of our joint violence is, and always was, zero.