hollow: he liked to rattle the key in the door when he came home in the evening, to give the cockroaches a running start, into cabinets, loose tiles, cracks in walls.  he knew when he walked in this time that she had left.  maybe because the place was cleaner than usual.  like her, to mop down the deck before jumping ship.  note with the usual shit, didn’t notice her anymore, took her for granted, relationship going nowhere.  Fine (drops platic bag of now too much chinese take out on the table, thinks of stale fortune cookie) it’s true.  beginning and end are always notable, the middle is just after one and before the other (a little buddhist bodhisattva pokes his head from the painted pagoda on the take out box, dispenses wisdom) like a bell curve upside down, significance only at start and finish, the creation and destruction.  but it is the bell shape that gives it sound (here chinese gong is struck in distance, signaling enlightenment), the hollowness of these things that allows them to reverberate, the sides of these affairs, this apartment, with nothing in between.