I want to wash you away the way I do swirling ink after scribbling on myself when I'm supposed to be taking notes, the way I would do dirt when I was a child after frolicking in the mud with my friends. I want to perch under a glistening showerhead and watch the steam billow over the glass, the torrents harsher yet more beautiful than any drizzle, simply because they have the power to wash away an entire day. And when I'm finished, I want to be rid of your very essence. Done? Gone? Good.

I scrub and I scrub and I scrub, every inch, until my hands are as cracked as any desert, and rawer than they ever have been. It works, I think, strolling through a field of flowers, head empty with thoughts besides what will be for dinner that night. I'm done with you. You are gone. Until I come upon the bench where we held hands for the first time and whispered for what seemed like hours but was really just short of twenty minutes, and then I'm not. You aren't.

The best course of action seems to be to try again and again, that if I just scrub harder, use more soap, it will work, and my slate will be clean. But the thing it seems to be best for is an extended tour of every moment we spent together. At the same time I manage to feel what I felt when I first met you and what I felt the last time I saw you.

My days grow filled with nothing. It takes eons to wipe away each and every word, each and every eyebrow quirk, each and every giggle, each and every sigh that somehow both warmed me and sent chills racing through me like Olympians.

It happens painfully slowly, a fragment of a thought and then another three days later. I'm hit with the fact that it was you who urged me to apply for my first job, where I found the offer of a lifetime. It was you who let me ramble until I had fully developed my theory on why there *had* to be aliens somewhere in the universe. I really can't help but wonder if you are woven into me like the roots of neighboring trees, making it impossible to slice off just one tiny bit without the possibility of slicing off a vital part of keeping the whole thing together.