i can hear her, quietly mewling in the bathroom, while the cat sits in front of the bookcase and tries to figure out how to dismember it. there is a solitude in the apartment that none of us could tame, broken only by her piteous little whimpers. i wonder if the doctor warned her it would be this bad.
the cat, having figured it out, paws her old copy of the complete Keats off the shelf. it falls open halfway along the spine, and he sinks his claws into the crinkly old paper. i shoo him off the dead lines and replace the book. she is coughing, heaving, crying.
she wrote her thesis on Keats, on the exploits of Endymion and the distance between those who love history and those who create it. academicians have loved her for her entire life, with the inexplicable fondness of rhetoricians who can't be moved for a younger questioner, troublemaker. she always asked why. with Keats it was the purity, the devotion so clear and clean, that attracted her. her own poetry is messy, rampant, explodes onto napkins at restaurants and the margins of her essays. but there is no purity in realism, or in the body—no doubt her next poems will reflect a deep disappointment in the mortality and physical weakness she's experiencing now. i tried to comfort her but, like me, she prefers to weather cheap pain on her own.
it rained all day, keeping her nausea down as she stood pressed against the balcony windows. palms to glass like she always is during the afternoon thunderstorms—she says the rainstorms are why she came here, and why she can never leave. now that it's evening the smells at the open windows are changing, from warm wet asphalt to cold damp grass.
i can hear her quieting down, and then she's standing in the bathroom doorway, backlit and wiping her hand across her mouth. a little moth in overgrown wings she looks like, in her too-large shirt and bare legs. she collapses into a corner of the couch, rubbing her forehead. when the light rain starts to fall again, she and the cat both look out the window and raise inquiring noses to the air.