We don’t talk about it. We take long walks in lake effect snow. I push my gloves into my coat pocket. Small penance for  big slights. Your face is for the sun. You inhale the crisp air. You stop to watch a great heron skip across a mildly frozen lake. Across the lake somebody is tearing something down. When my hands start to go numb, I don’t tell you at first. There are some things I don’t expect you to understand. You bury me in snow, to forget. My lips, the starkness of my cheeks, the disguised emptiness in my dark eyes. The small chill in the tips of my fingers compounds until my hands are compact as cylindrical ice blocks. You help me up. Guilt keeps your mouth shut. You take my hands between yours. Rub them hard, add friction. Your sunlit blue eyes never leave mine, add tension. The crimson sunset comes tinged with anxiety. I would like to think you’re divided. I would like to think your silence is remembering. There is something I am not doing right, something I should change, but it is cruel how you already know that nothing I do will matter. 

Naana Eyikuma Hutchful is a Ghanaian writer with work appearing in Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and forthcoming elsewhere. They like sunrises, yearning, and Wong Kar-wai films. IG: alewife__cinnamon.