I still check if you see my stories, now you never do. I don’t know for sure what this means, or what it means that I confess it with words. Truthfully, I don’t miss you, and I cannot admit we were at all convincing. But part of me wishes for validation, that someone like yourself, could somehow become addicted to someone like myself. That there are deeper circuits behind the hollow laughs after a joke you made that got too close to truth. That there is more than your desire for only pretty things and disregard of the roughen obscure. That there is more in the storehouse that doesn’t require a drink to allow you to become alive with me. That there is a blank canvass instead of a blank expanse. Even if just the routine midnight one-too-many gin and tonics, I felt an energy from you deep within. Maybe that’s why I keep looking at the screen, refreshing the stories, thinking (hoping) you might message. Inside me I wished that our unipolar imbalance could’ve struck an equality, that if there was some sunken magma gusto fire pit churning on your side, then where was mine, could it have happened.