Last Sigh

and still she remembers that first sigh - exhaling after breathing him in, the intoxicating him beside her, arms touching, dust dancing in the air from his skin to hers. The streets they walked together were mapped in ink, blue and black footprints on a landscape of knowing winks and hushed laughter; seeing his mouth smiling in the bending letters of street signs, his playful fingers in branches overhanging a park. But when he left, her shoes became erasers rubbing their walks from cobblestones and their handholding from benches, her footprints eroding where she once remembered his gait in the swaying of a pub sign, heard his voice in the splash of paws in puddles. As she remembers that first sigh of such promise, that luxurious breeze of young passion and dizzying air of a first love, she struggles, now, to breathe silence.