whenever the world goes quiet and dark, i see the bind between us twisting from my feet to wherever you are, warm and smooth like water in the summer. it might look different to you, i might pull on it less than you’d like but i still keep it closer to me than the lies i’ve made up for myself and the anger i have towards everyone else. don’t miss me. i won’t be gone long.
Dear Laura
Did you always know you’d be leaving us early? Was that why time was so sacred to you? Did you take the lifespan you projected for yourself and adjust time accordingly? You spent fifteen minutes eating oatmeal for breakfast every day, and lost half a week. You slept for months at a time. And when you celebrated your one-year anniversary with my brother, you smiled at him with the confidence of a wife of forty years.
I wish, sometimes, that you’d left something for me. A letter, like the one you wrote for my brother, or the CD you left for your parents that you labelled with a smiley face in black Sharpie. I wish I had some proof that we’d been tied together. But most of the time, I know that you wanted to leave me something different, the image burned onto my retinas of the last look you gave me, the accusatory one that I turned away from, the shouting in your eyes that begged me to do something. The question: what should I have done. What could I have done. The answer: absolutely nothing, and absolutely everything.
