You across from me on rickety, wooden stools on the quiet corner of 4th street and Division.

Bits of grit stuck between your teeth from the blueberry muffin crumbling in front of you, but I did not mind.

We rest our clasped hands on the cool metal table top.

Its vast expanse lays out in front of us.

The world around us was swelling.

You used to run your mouth a million miles a minute. Every empty second I had spent before you was now bursting. You made every moment I’d spent jaded by the saturation of the world clear. You prescribed me a pair of rose-colored glasses in exchanged for the thick, heavy lenses you later smashed into the uneven sidewalk. Remnants of the static world I once knew were swept away by the street sweeper the next day.

I would give you a single syllable and the whole world would open up. The gaping holes that I had been building mysteries in were beginning to unravel at your will.

Sherlock and Watson would have been impressed.

You didn’t break down the barriers, you found a way to climb over them and asked if you could come in.

The gears were always moving.

The grass was always greener for you, the politics was always sharper, the books were always deeper.

The Sunday morning newspaper never sat untouched.

It waited feverishly for you to unwrap its crisp corners and release the smell of its brand new ink.

A sigh would soon rise from your chest when the letters to the editor overwhelmed you.

But Atticus Finch taught you to be patient and Maya Angelou taught you to be kind.

You wrote your own letter to the editor the next week keeping them in mind.

But then there was a cog in the machine.

I could feel us start to burst at the seams, outgrowing each other like our siblings hand me down jeans.

When I wanted to go East, you wanted to go West.

Our hearts began growing in different time zones.

Our poorly circulated fingers weaved between each others searching for warmth from one another.

We squeezed tighter but couldn’t seem to find it.

You arrived in my life and filled it so completely that we had nowhere left to go.

The abundance of cheap coffee that used to bring us so close together now clutters the vast expanse of smooth, metal table top in front of us.

The coffee turned cold.

The world around us swelled too much.