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Some arm crept around me 72 hours ago, it angled its wrist to feel the cavity and flesh around my ribs. What no one knows is if you push on the lowest rib bone you can move it in and out of its lock in the sternum. Push once and it becomes dislodged, push again and it falls back into its solicitous pocket. If it were one of three people I would have felt the questioning fist with my fingers, felt every crevice from nail bed to knuckle, gently folded each finger except index and middle, placed it on that spot on my lower chest and said push.

Until about one month and six days ago no one had slept in my bed since I had moved in on January 4th, 2010, without a bed to sleep on, there was no mattress. Men would question my insistence that they go home at some sun rising time. In my head they had already left and whatever was left of me would not say a word and stare, gripping the frigid doorknob, angling nails into palm.

This anomalous year of 361.25 days is the same year I insisted on fortifying what was left. I told girls falling in some replication of love that I was making more pragmatic decisions. I laughed at my own paradox and no one was listening hard enough to realize, as they weren't to much of what was being told to them.

83 days ago one of the three returned, 47 days ago the second and 4 days ago the third. Somehow in my year of false practicality I had become bereft of any quixotic capability for their simultaneously searching fingers. Instead I simply removed the stranger's hand and caressed the aberration myself, pushing once and not again.

I had no say in their departure and no part in their return. It's precisely this impuissance that aggravated the destruction of the one thing I was most terrified of; that they'd leave once again with only a negligent farewell.

"As you get older you find out the place where you started out pulls at you stronger and stronger."

[A. Proulx]