Philip White

“Talking only makes me feel more alone,” you said once in the car outside the clinic. Two years later, you spoke the same sentence word for word one night after friends had gone. Within a month, you’d erased yourself    . . . Erased? “To absent oneself,” I found scribbled on a wrapper a year later    . . . Now sunlight and tree shadow rush over the windshield of  the car: I’m talking with my new wife — then gone,absented. “Sometimes I feel almost too much joy,” you wrote from the balcony of  your cheap hotel in Paris. “What are you thinking?” she asks. Light shutters across us. Wherever you are in me I’m there, though it’s not what you wanted.