The tourniquette slowly loosened the further they walked up the mountain, and little bits of dust and filth started to cling to the drying blood.

All that morning he came up with things to say to her that might force her into his life, but the reality he wanted remained just on the edge of his vision, like a thin mist that disappeared once he was in it. He wandered around the streets, bought a coffee and drank it absent-mindedly, burning his tongue.

He ended up lurched over a notebook, another coffee in front of him, at a diner he normally would have avoided. The food was too expensive, but looked like it was too cheap. His pen was placed neatly parallel to the right edge of his notebook and he watched the cream swirl into his coffee, Brownian motion and the spin of the earth combining to mix it so that he didn't have to move or think.

In the drift of feet that had brought him here, to this glossy table and plastic smelling air, he'd decided to write her a letter, detailing the truth of things as they were, in a clear staccato style. But now that he was here, all he could imagine were the trillions of coffee molecules bumping into each other and intermingling with the milk and the air, exchanging heat like hellos. The initial drive he had to bare everything for her had dissipated, so he tried to conjure the violent things he imagined when he saw the shapes that comprised her face.

[He imagined burning her house down, for the hundredth, thousandth time. Watching the cracks of despair visible from the top of her head as he pressed her face against his chest. The firefighters arrived and the blaze was tamed, but all that was left of her apartment was a gutted remnant, pools of water forming in her closet around her mementos and knick-knacks.

That night they fucked in a cold hotel with the sounds of the highway loud in his ears. They'd turned off the lights but the green glow of the parking lot seeped in and made her eyes look like and skin look like wax. He imagined a thin-legged insect landing on her, and her incapable of precise enough feeling to notice. They fucked for what seemed like hours, and for the duration he tried to pull himself out of the machine-valve feeling that he always had with her when they did this. But nothing worked, and he made the right moves by rote. Eventually she made signs of satisfaction and he rolled off of her, bits of sweat forcing the starchy sheets to cling to the back of his calves. She gripped him panting and tried fumblingly to continue, to pleasure him, but he rolled away from her and mumbled some incoherent nothing which she didn't pursue. A smile leaked across her face and momentarily he recognized the makings of an expression on her face. But it passed. The sheets clung to both of them and between them and he was mildly happy for the barrier. He was happier still that he'd destroyed her home and her past and here she was, soft and molten beside him as if nothing had happened.]

The thought of her drenched in anxious sweat, satisfied and dulled by him, brought him back to the letter and he picked up the pen carefully while he waited for his over-priced salad.