I like to remember you. It is a favorite pastime of mine—the dip in your throat, the softness in your eyes, the set in your jaw. I like to remember the way you bit your nails to the quick or how you stroked my cheek in the yellow light of winter. I like your body. I like your face. I like the movement of your muscles, quick and precise. To touch you was one of my finer delights.

Time is cruel. Memory is crueler. Habit is the cruelest. I lost you to these devices—the weight of time, the blanket of memory and the hatefulness of your habit. Your love for me was constantly dwarfed by your love for small blue pills that tinted your lips and fouled your mouth when you kissed me.

In your absence, my mind creates a shadow of you, a vivid hallucination that manifests itself in my dreams. I remember your hands. You had hands like tree branches, with vines the curled and crept between my own to take root. You brought me green apples on afternoons in late spring, and I remember the pads of your fingers, warm and rough and moving up the curve of my elbow, tracing translucent blue veins. It was a time of swinging feet, flower crowns and scab picking. It began like that.

When I try and remember you now (eyes shut tight, lashes against the rise of my cheekbone and hands clasped over the roll in the center of my stomach) there are two instances that I can recall more vividly than others. In one, you are small, just taller than me and thrown backwards. I remember that there was red dirt under my fingernails from the baseball field I had dragged you through so that we might reach a spot in the woods. Hands clasped, we’d hopped the fence and run across first base, pausing to catch our breath and jump about on the pitchers mound before breaking back into a run. My toe caught on third base and I fell forward, one hand outstretched, the other still clutching yours, pulling you down and into the descent. We fell, and I scraped the heels of my palms on the deep red gravel, russet and the color of that summer. We laughed, and you jumped up, spry and half-awkward, coltish and joyful. This is how I like to remember you, in shades of red, brown and green, your chest heaving and cheeks colored and stretched. I remember you like this—with a half smile, delighted and reaching down to me to lift me from the soil.

If I close my eyes tighter to remember again, press my lashes to the bone and curl inward on myself, that second lucid image of you unfurls from the place where I had it pressed and tucked away. Curled and crying, I remember that the air was cool, even though it was an especially stagnant May. I remember tracing the arch of your spine with my fingers, concentric circles on the small of your back, and the pad of my thumb at the nape of your neck. Your arms were stretched in front of you, long expanses of flesh like a canvas in child’s pose or prayer. I told you that I was not looking at the gouges that stretched from your shoulder to the soft place under your wrist and onwards to the start of your palm that I had held a summer ago. I promised I was not looking at the bruises, dark serpents from the damaged veins in the crook of your elbow and creeping down and around your arm. I told you I was not looking and I traced concentric circles on your back, getting smaller and smaller until they disappeared into nothing and then started all over again.

I shake my reverie now, and I love you (in both moments and in all moments). You blew through my like bullets, leaving stains on my sheets and on my soul. I cannot reclaim this time from the void.

Perhaps you are not my greatest loss, because at night, before I sleep, I see my grandmother’s yellow, wax hands cupping my chin as she kissed me on the fore head one last time. I see my mother’s face reflected in a bottle of wine. But when I curl inwards, press my eyelashes to the rise of my cheeks and place my hands over the roll in the center of my stomach, you certainly feel like the most potent and pressing hole in my life. I would bring you back, would I could. I would gather up all the parts of you that you’d left behind; wrap you up in a napkin and put you in my pocket. I would collect the fingerprints on filmy teacups, ash between carpet fibers, raspberry seeds, and every eyelash that you wished on and blew away. I would carry you about like a little universe of my own and maybe then, I wouldn’t be quite so lonely.

I remember you. So please, remember me. Remember the way my hair fell about my shoulders. Remember me, smearing frosting off a cupcake on your cheek in the same baseball field where I held your hands two years earlier. Remember the way I stutter when I’m exited, or the way I looked, soaked and dripping, wading in the lake after you’d shoved me under that glass lidded, green gaping maw of the water the summer that we were 14. Remember sleeping on lazy afternoons or drunkenly playing Rock Band instead of attending lectures. Remember my battle, the war my disease waged against my mind. Remember the way I cried on your lap in the early hours of morning. Remember cleaning the shards of glass off the floor after I threw the dishes in our kitchen against the wall. Remember the way I clung to your shirt at night and begged you to stay, or how you left anyway, walking home in the cruel February air. Remember the way my hand slipped from yours in the hospital or the desperation in my voice when I begged you not to go, bleeding and aching and mad. Please, remember me and my misery because I will never forget how it lost me all I wanted.