What the Sparrow Believes

I.

There’s a rule I keep in a drawer in my kitchen:

You cannot fall in love with someone who doesn’t ask you a single question.

It’s noted on the back of a recipe card for bone broth, written in the hospital the week my mother died. I don’t cook, not really. Sometimes I move the drawer just to hear the clatter.

Anyway:

I met him at a reading in Kentish Town where everyone was pretending they hadn’t worked on their excerpts. His was about the psychic cost of architectural symmetry. It was not good. I couldn’t stop my yawn from escaping.

He asked me what I thought of it, then didn’t wait for the answer.

We had a drink. He drank four.

I learned nothing except he had once lived in Marseille and sometimes forgot English words when tired.

He said: I like women who look like they’ve just gotten out of bed.

I said: That’s not a compliment.

But it was.

II.

Started attending all his events. Readings, panels, a podcast taping in the basement of a museum that had once been a prison. It felt like a prison that had once been a museum.

He read things that weren’t true and claimed they were.

He read things that were true and insisted they were fiction.

Somewhere in the tangle of this, he began texting me at 1 a.m. with links to obscure German films and poems about drowning.

He said: I like the way you look at people like you’re about to write them down.

I did write him down.

Then I burned the pages in the sink.

Then I retrieved the ashes with my fingers and rubbed them on the inside of my wrist.

I wanted to eat the parts of him that weren’t performing.

III.

He said we shouldn’t sleep together because he respected me.

Then he did it anyway.

He cried during.

I didn’t ask why.

The next morning, he left a note:

You remind me of the bit in a poem where everything is about to come apart.

IV.

I tried to stop.

Stopped going to his events.

Stopped answering messages.

Walked instead.

Walked until blisters formed and popped.

I counted my steps like years.

I told myself I was in recovery.

Dated a man who made me soup. He had a small, safe mouth.

We listened to rain, as if it was worth listening to.

I wasn't on his wavelength.

I broke up with him.

V.

Saw him again in a gallery. Cliche, right.

There was a woman next to him, whispering into his neck.

He pretended not to see me.

I followed him for twenty-one minutes afterwards.

Imagined saying:

I’m not here. I never was. You imagined me.

Imagined him saying:

But I need you to exist. I couldn’t bear it otherwise.

He didn’t turn around.

I stopped.

VI.

There’s a sparrow in my kitchen now.

It flew in last night.

Hurls itself at the window repeatedly, believing in a freedom it doesn’t understand, convinced that the air beyond the glass is waiting for it.

Each time it does, my heart flinches in reply, like there’s a small wildness inside me repeating the rhythm.

I watch, identifying as false hope.

I could open the window.

I could let it go.

But I don’t.

Not yet.

I want to see how long it takes before it stops believing.