I can’t remember your favorite plant, or our last fight, or why I cried on the bedroom floor with my back against the heater begging it to burn my bare skin, or what your mom said when she walked up with your laundry and opened the bedroom door to find us sitting on opposites sides of the bed, or how awkward I felt having my head on your chest only minutes before smelling the scent of your hair that could have been oranges, or something else, I can’t recall the equations you helped me solve in the early afternoon before I rode my bike back up the street and texted that I got home safe, and I’m not sure when it all stopped_______________________________________________________________________ but I think it was because I figured out how to do them by myself, maybe I imagined I no longer needed you, and maybe you called me heartless, or beat me to it and left, but here in the silence, I can’t remember if I made it all up.
Robin Van Impe is a queer Belgian writer with an MFA Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she served as the Fiction Editor for Redivider. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from The Cimarron Review, Boston Globe, Fourteen Hills, Ghost Parachute, and others. She was a 2024 finalist of the Arts & Letters Unclassifiable Contest and was shortlisted for the Smokelong Grand Micro Contest. Robin is also the organizer of “100 Notable Press Books” in collaboration with LitHub.
