He felt the leaving coming. You can feel the end. 

You don’t work through it, it works through you, it works you through and through, she said once.

The final night he stayed up watching her. And with the shift in bed, he saw the nightshirt lift, the markings there, the skin there thin like paper. And there, on her belly, on the crest of her stomach he read this:

Proposition:

If the child were his. If her womb held something that was half himself. If he had been the one to hold the place inside her, filled her space. If he had found her first.

Then. We would not be dealing in symbol, equation, and sign. Then she might be the ray. Then he. Might be her premise, he might be her !.

Before she left, she placed her braid on the pillow. She’d offed while he slept, crept in the room to rest it on the bed. When he saw it in the morning, it moved him the same way a wet limb might. And that was her goodbye. A tethered band of hair, a myth, a sad arithmetic.