London
14 October 1917
Because you are missing I reach out in the darkness and touch another man’s body.
He is solid, and protection, and unaware of me weeping beneath him.
He remains very still, and this helps.
It is cold.
He is both a man and a desperation, here for a reason.
Perhaps in daylight someone will see where you are.
His folded limbs act as a blind, a way not to see, and this evasion opens out onto some kind of imagined evidence that things might remain as they were and, in some small way, matter.
I was warned several times about this, the risks, what might happen if you raised your head.