I sat on the edge of the community pool when he told me he loved me. There was no intimacy, no romance, just the degration of the publicity and the lack of anything sacred, which thrilled me and I flushed. He thought it was embarassment, and pushed me off the side into the water.

I kept sinking and suffocating myself in all my excess clothes and lies I was wearing. The death was as mute and seamless as teh water that cradled me. Neither of us reached for the other, but understood it and accepted it as if it had never happened as I disintegrated right in front of him.