Like a flower that comes up the first warm week of March, only to be frozen the next day, or like a coup attempt that fails at the first meeting, because both attendants turn out to be infiltrators, or like a planet that enters another’s sphere of gravity, and then catapults out into the great emptiness, or maybe like a novel that is started one night with all the correct preparations, and then when the silence is there, and the implausible supply of pens and paper, and the vanitas skull on the tablecloth, and the glow of the streetlight outside, and the distance from all that requires distance, and the closeness to all that requires closeness, yes, much like that novel that turns out to be only a moment, our relationship never really got off the ground.