The end of the world is the freckle you hide with seventeen dollar concealer, a shade too dark, sitting just above your lip, fixed there like a windblown sailor on a doomed ship.

You’ve toyed with the idea of getting it removed with laser surgery; it’s vexed you your entire life. From when you were in your linen nappies to when you donned today’s sensible workaday brassiere, you’ve devised all manner of machinations to hide it: a hovering left hand, an affected underbite, an embarrassing space of time in your adolescence during which you decided Chinese fans were the height of couture.

It’s a melanin supernova, collapsing under the weight of its own tragic gravity and taking me with it, when you say: “I’ve packed your things.” You are swilling wine, an Italian extra dry for which I, as a plebian and mere mortal, will never muster an appreciation. “How thoughtful,” I sneer, because I am inadequate and spiteful, and you turn your whipcord back to me in order to cast your discerning gaze from my various failures to the street outside our window. Your window. Your Spartan furniture, your utilitarian decorations, your name on the lease, my collection of brittle, aging books in crates arranged with meticulous malice by the door.

We are dry and hateful things. I remember that once we were not us, but two bodies tangled, laughing in bed, in a fairytale before you took the bar and before I took the job at the periodical, Soulsucking Weekly. Not me, my teeth scraping your milky collarbone red, not you, your breath quick and bearing my name. Not us.

I am bleeding but not broken, and you are held together by your three-piece suit and 401K plan. I will take what you’ve packed for me, I will find a studio apartment, I will go to work at 9 am and return at 5 pm a little more deflated than when I left, and I will remember that we imploded quietly because I loved you more than you loved me. I have always known, since I first set my hungry mouth to that oft-lamented freckle on the bow of your own, that I would tumble into its universe and suffer for its greatness.