It's been a year, but my grandma says I'm in a wonderful area to be creative.

There was the smell of him first – & then the smell of cigarettes, distantly – cold, sucking wind. Liminal, hypnogogic – the bloom of him in her mind, his body a thin sheet draped over her cortex so that he becomes something of a phantom limb – or there are phantoms of his limbs on her body, & she wakes up with the dull-edged sense of his back against her belly (his vertebrae still sticking like seed to fur). She is in the backseat of a car, the window open to the blizzard outside, someone smoking, careening down a highway. She thinks she is asleep until she realizes that she does not blink in dreams – but the smell of him still deep in her nostrils, her body still percolating as if against his skin.