text: The air in front of him shattered, shards of the image before him falling to the ground. He curls, bent double. He drops to his knees. His face can feel the heat emanating from the ground. A warm, dense smell - the familiar industrial scent of concrete drying after a heavy rain. His hands, collecting the pieces that were once everything he cared about. A kaleidoscope of fractured memories, each piece broken and beautiful. Hands shaking, he tries to piece his very existence back together, but the images are fading quickly from the shards. He holds one fragment for an instant and it’s gone - a touch, erased from history. He’s left holding glass, clear as the sky that hangs high and mockingly over his head. A teardrop forms at the corner of his eye. It’s ready to take away another pain from the incomprehensible, yet uncontrollable torrent of thoughts streaming through his mind. It feels itself heavy, rippling from the unconscious trembling of his body. The weight of it, no longer able to be held by his eye. It falls. A journey to the earth which takes mere seconds, but for this lone tear it represents an entire lifetime. It rises over his cheek, leaving behind a trail of the thought it’s carrying. It feels every pore of his skin in the single file line it travels down his face. He feels the momentary warmth, followed by the piercing cold as the wind cools the trail. It feels the aged lines that radiate from his eyes the way a child draws the rays of the sun. It traverses the deep canyons formed from a face deep in the throws of indescribable anguish. It passes his lips, but it will never know the beauty of his smile; a smile that intoxicates everyone who takes witness of it. Instead, it’s memory of his lips will be the turned down and quivering mass, parted slightly as it tries desperately to fill his lungs with air. It’s journey has nearly come to an end. It hangs heavy on his chin. Gripping to his face as if on the edge of a cliff, holding on with just its index and middle fingers. It’s tiring. It knows it’s time to leave him. It let’s go, free falling to the ground in front of him, taking with it the memory of the smell of jasmine as they walked through the streets of Paddington in the spring together, their hands, skin on skin, the energy of their souls intertwined like the double helix of their DNA. It falls in slow motion. The pavement is looking up. Looking at this solitary droplet driving towards it. It knows that everything that touches it has fallen. The teardrop is getting closer. It knows what comes next - the familiar and predictable outcome of all tears that have ever fallen and will ever fall. It resists the atoms of the teardrop; forcing them to detach from each other. The memory contained in the lone tear explodes and evaporates. A small speck of transient dark concrete waits to dry. The memory waits to dry. Tear by tear - thought by thought, their souls disconnect. The entanglement unwinds. The knots that their love built, slowly loosen. The air around him thins; his lungs fill with the crisp cool air that only autumn is capable of producing. He can feel the tingle in the back of his throat as it enters his being. He looks up. The hands on his watch stop. The headlights shine brightly into his eyes.