Single Wing

7:45 a.m., I walk back from the bus stop. Marcio is off to work. I watched him climb onto the bus and I watched him move through it and I watched it drive away from me. I realize that I always have to watch him leave, whether he's visiting me or I'm visiting him, I always have to watch him leave and he never has to watch me leave, just once, that first time, I think, he took me to the airport.

I'm a bit sad, as I have been trying to ignore for the last twelve hours, that it's time for me to go home and that my visit didn't turn out at all as I'd planned, but well aware that I'd have an equally potent sadness now if things had, in fact, turned out as wonderful and romantic as I'd hoped. They successfully cancel each other out, my real sadness versus the imagined one, and I walk home. At the base of the stairs to Marcio's apartment, I find a single butterfly wing, large and yellow, and I hold it in my palm for a moment, and wonder where the butterfly with one wing has gone, and hold it, fragile, in my palm, aware that it's a thing that I'll never understand. I let the wing flutter back to the ground and go upstairs. In three hours I'll be flying home.