The Losing-Green Knowledge

In the hours before our pillows fell to the floor, before the showerhead dropped water in rhythmic thumps as I sang songs we heard on the radio the night before while preparing dinner, before toothpaste ooze stuck to the bathroom sink, she would lay motionless on the far side of the bed with sheets stripped down to her waist, staring at yellow plastic stars scattered across the ceiling of our room, the ones that once held a nighttime glow. She would study them with lost-green graveyard eyes, the color of laminated seaweed. I would hear her breathing like a land-found fish, gasping the unfamiliar while she clutched the protruding outline curves of her breasts with unraveling fists. She would roll over to me slowly and I would stroke her damp cheeks while she buried her eyes behind my hand. She would cry, reporting to me fragments from her interstellar dreams, how she had reached out for me. She would tell me how the galaxy’s council handed me a giant calculator and how I froze over the screen, unable to calculate the distance between our fingertips. She would say, I lost you, Zachary, I lost you again, Zach, I lost you for good, Baby... as if I could comprehend her newly uncharted world of trees that bled the sounds of Mercury, where colors were experts in chemistry. She would roll over swallowing her tears and say, I lost you for good, before closing her eyes.