Your lipstick had come off. It was on the lid of the coffee cup, where you had left it. I suppose part of me wanted to keep it, the cup, but thankfully I’m not that ill-adjusted. Not anymore anyway, or not yet at least. Eventually one is obliged to go back to the beginning. Sometimes there are glimpses of things in small details. You see them as if out of the corner of your eye. The beginning, then: well, no beginning as yet, just preamble. So it seems to me anyway. I have a close tally of the hours, but the minutes flew all about us, like chaff. You were stood over me, staring, eyes like water. That’s when I noticed the missing lipstick. The space where the lipstick had been, as it were. It wasn’t until after you left that I noticed the cup. It was all that remained of you in the room, the lipstick I mean, except I suppose for the sensation that something vital was now missing from me. In me this felt like a crater. Negative space framed by compressed earth, dense and heavy. Not a thing but the absence of it. I threw the cup away. The crater is proving harder to dispose of. Not being a thing I suppose it would be.

Bio: Simon Ravenscroft