To the one who's gone
A fourth specimen from the letter shop. No buyer, no sender.
You'd have hated a tidy eulogy. People get smoother after they die, you said, and you refused to be smoothed.
I still talk to you at the sink. Not praying. Just talking. The dishes are where I keep you.
Here's what nobody tells you about grief: it doesn't shrink. You get bigger around it, and some days you don't, and that has to be allowed too.
Your name is a common one, so it ambushes me in grocery aisles. I've decided to take it as a hello. I found your handwriting in a cookbook last week, a note in the margin about salt, of all things, and it took me twenty minutes to stand up.
The thing I never said while it could still reach you: I saw you. Not the version you handed to rooms. The other one. I saw you and I stayed, and I thought that was obvious. It wasn't. I should have said it in words.
You told me once you wanted to be missed the way a lighthouse is missed, not the way fireworks are. I'm trying. Some nights the light sweeps past where you used to be, and I let it.
If it's yours, you'll know. I write these in your voice, $30 by card. Tell me.
The Unsent Letter · [email protected] · send one sentence you never sent; the first lines come back free.