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.
