She journals in the morning.
Sometimes ink.
Sometimes ash, candle wax,
salt rubbed from her own skin.
She calls some of them spells.
There are pages she cannot read afterward
and pages she has crossed through hard enough
to tear.
Others disappear beneath wax.
Whatever was there
stays there.
The book is heavier than it should be.
I have held it.
I don’t know what to make of that.
Sometimes she leaves it open by the window
and lets the wind turn the pages.
If it wants to read, she says,
it can read.
I stopped asking when she was joking.
Grief goes in too.
Names. Dates.
Things she remembers.
Things she would rather not.
Small warnings written in the margins
that she will probably ignore.
There are spiders in the house sometimes.
She finds a glass,
slides paper beneath them,
carries them outside carefully.
Never kills them.
I imagine it is respect.
She talks to them on the way out.
Of course she does.
She breathes smoke when she laughs.
At first I thought it was the light,
or cold air,
or something ordinary I could explain.
But it curls from her mouth
when something really gets her
and hangs between us for a while.
She used to cover it with her hand.
She doesn’t anymore.
Sometimes there is soot at the corners of her mouth.
She paints her lips red anyway.
It suits her.
There are days the room feels different when she enters.
Not darker.
Just fuller.
As if something came in behind her
and decided not to leave.
She doesn’t seem afraid of it.
Maybe it knows that.
Once I asked what she writes in the book.
She looked at me long enough
that I almost took the question back.
You probably don’t want to know.
That has never stopped me before.
She smiled.
Smoke.
Some mornings the windows are open
even when it is cold.
Ash along the sill.
Wax hardened on the table.
The book closed again.
Nothing else.
Some mornings I still check the horizon
to see what she left behind.
