Heartbreak Aubade | by Veronica Beatrice Walton

Today I occupy myself with the sound of 
wind chimes outside. Today I woke up 

and my bed shook into fragments underneath 
me. Today and tonight are the same to 

me and I spent both having dreams about 
you. I did not mean to do this, so in 

other words, the dreams had me. I dreamt 
of touching you and then you leaving and then 

of searching for you among all of the people 
we had yet to meet together. Then I dreamt 

of flags pulling at themselves, of a sleepless house 
with no one inside but a record playing 

voices long gone, a piano’s whir long translated. There 
is a kindness in emptiness, an admission. You can 

do anything with heartbreak, so I dreamt of the 
Great Wall. I dreamt of canals and the soles of 

our feet and the entryway of God. That is to say, the things 
that stand between us also somehow lead me to you, in 

some great surrogate world. Gatwood writes, The boy 
tells me who he is, and I listen. I’m not sure 

how much you can actually hear in dreams. When you 
told me that a train was passing by and that your voice 

over the phone would blur for a second, I wanted to be 
there, experience the same physics for a moment, to 

feel like I could keep up with the world you 
were creating. I can’t have you the way I want to

have you. But I hover here now and I count the 
things I own. My hands, folding under earth 

and the buttons of my dress. The blanket of time 
spread across bookshelves and windows and 

museum walls. Or how, when I divide certain 
numbers, the expectation of something to be a decimal 

when it’s really a whole number. How do we know 
how much of something to preserve? I could never 

abandon a house such as this, thorough and purple and 
speckled in my memory. Because if something has 

weight, it can always move. Because you can look at 
something and watch it shift, ocean hanging over 
ocean.