You live with white walls, an oak desk. Collections of Yates. Richard Ford.

This year, there’s no dirty jokes. No spaghetti sauce bubbling with tomato-colored cheer.

No hugs, lavender perfume, butter-colored lights blanketing you.

Just Zoom, accentuating shadows. You can’t feel polished stairways. Savor angles and doorways.

The lights dim.

Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA fiction program. Yash’s work has been published in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and Ariel Chart, among others. He lives in Garden Valley, Idaho.