Shattering should be prescribed to portraits; to vases; to the finality of the items we send into cement storms.

However, it seems, those items, or beings, those loves and adorations seem most precious to us at the end of it all. We struggle to put back together the most immaterial of shards, those shot dead by our wildest winterings, the velveteen strength of human hands. We pat and pet back at glass, at greed, at the gaps of these creatures whose tongues, whose teeth, whose torches we have suddenly expired.

Repercussion still bites back. And still we ignore its eyes, all golden and awake in the midnight that cites our exhaustion. Still we shun the yellow pupils that portray us as toddlers of rage.

On Dublin

I am unsure of these waves, shot gray by a thundering sky, struck gray by both the gulf and the gods. I am now always unsure of the sea, its true face momentarily lost of phantom, no skeletal beings ready to eschew the racket that all bones grow; this flicker of memory and might imprinted only for the decades on our land.

The beauty here, as I was destined to learn from my dear friend, is the sea. It is the short, shining houses and a familiar horizon that is not mine, but I see in his words, nostalgia, nick of a grin—is a fawn reflection of love for home. How often such love is forgotten—as if all love should be bent upon men and creatures; as if the love for our place, our space, our scents and tastes is somehow less real, is unexpected, is closer to the surface of hearts. Here is both a bright and a gray gift of home, the tasty brown fury only compliment to warmth of laughter; a laughter for which I fall fully and quickly; a laughter that licks my wounds.

This Irish city is almost oppositional to my own home, which is why I am unsure of the familiarity that ebbs inside. The buildings are short and undaunting; they do not challenge each other and thus can coexist freely and fully, not symmetrically but seemingly right. The home where I stay is a full house by the sea, unlike my apartment by the raw river of Manhattan. And yet time feels as velveteen as in my Westside. I wonder if it is the family, the strong, devoted mother; the wonderfully humoured father; the children grown and so clearly, fully loved. I wonder if the bond between my friend and I arises from this—knowing the warmth, the strength, the impossible beauty of familes and homes. As we have found a piece of that home not in the body of our old shared house, but in the space within and between us; an unidentifiable if sixth sense that marks kin by far more than blood.

When in Crete

It is the end of the summer and somehow I am constantly struck awake by an embrace of yours. It was also a wet, hazy morning and I was standing by our kitchen table with my arms linked around myself; then, still, I was stuck in my postponed adolescence, heady, hormonal rage that no one could climb inside of—and from which no one could let me out. Like a child that morning, like the child of yours that I always was, you drew me into your arms, uncurled my own long limbs from around my latched waist, my human armor pointless and pitiful against love.

There is nothing I want more now. It is all that I ask for, knowing the hollow at the end of this wish.

I spend days wondering where things would stand if you were not gone. A mixture of yearning and need draws me to this point, in which I wonder whether your pride would lie in my ability to climb out of that hole. If you would be reveling in the peace that followed, that was broken only by your absence, but so broken bitterly, wounds that cannot—cannot begin to—heal. If we would be south, fishing, waking at dawn, both happily asleep by sunset, wholly unaffected by the call of night.

I cannot talk to you aloud. Despite suggestions. Despite the newfound and particularly ironic desire I share with my sister for ghosts; despite my knowledge that you still somehow, somewhere exist; despite the times I catch a glance of myself in the mirror and your eyes look back, or our forehead, or our nose. But in writing I can somehow say the things that stick at the tip of my tongue; that are nonsensical and yet the root of the wrenching that still wakes me, that leaves me always cold.

What I wish the most, is that I had skipped my dawdling into adulthood and never stepped back from the fierceness of your love. That I had gone with you that last time to eat impossibly expensive burgers and sip fountains of iced tea. That I would climb beside you in a car this afternoon, we would drive down Midwest roads and only then in response to sleepless nights, would I shift into slumber—a daughter needing the hum of movement, needing the sliding streets, needing you close. That we were now in Crete, as promised, blurred by both the beauty and the lifelines of books you had eaten with your eyes.

Take

Mistake hearkens amelioration, as if life's curtain can be drawn again. Mistake invites nostalgia and drags me back, in the warmth of this sunset night, in the reflection of those kitten heels and a girl's perfume at my neck.

It is funny that it is her and her laughter, here in a city that was not that of our friendship, that brings it back. A ghost that is ours and ours alone--save our Hungarian friend with her beautiful music and mountainous laugh. It is funny that I miss in a way succumbed to by my small fairy friend at once and without warning. And it is harder to realize that hate gives way to this wash of longing, of lilting towards a line already lived aloud. That is rife in remembering the bitter shocks of red; the maple syrup drawn to, within; the most beautiful of rage.

What touches is that familiar scent and sound; these Siamese twins still tender renderings of the wooden seats curved to our opposite of frames; those waffles so fat with life that they bit back; that fire of beginning; that fire of the carpets, of the woods.

Perhaps it is because I could look above and beyond a neighborhood I have outloved. And with that so many memories that bite back, which laid down in the shadow of such tragedy, only now, in this flowery air of my friend, begin to set themselves free. They are released, in me, in these breaths, these words from which I cannot step aside; they are unearthed with such honor and honesty that even in my exhaustion I cannot sleep. Even in this attempt I cannot put this into words. The relief lies somewhere much deeper than resting or writing or realizing. Although I know an attempt at relief is as futile as my movement towards the cardboard past.