Forever Twenty, Should be Twenty-Four

This must be my reckoning.

To suffer through a memory of you curling over, hand-to-mouth laughing – a silly joke, you lose a hand of UNO, a jump-scare too close and too real to shake off easily. Reliving our bedtime: Baba tucked you in, but I stir you awake for a new episode of The Walking Dead. We shit-talked ourselves into giggles, putting off tomorrow just a bit longer. How odd we felt that for just one hour, time paused – only to be reminded time never stopped or slowed. It shifted – our own little world of zombies and yawns, hissing warnings at the television, begging for next week to hurry up and be tonight – how odd we felt that we still had so much more time.

Devoid of patience, I wonder: when will I bury you deeply enough? I beg the fire to take me too – turn flesh to ash, allow me to blow where the wind carries you so I can achieve in distance what I’ve failed in depth – to be swept away into the memories of you, the part that no longer stings. I do not wish to forget you. I just want to stir you awake – an impossibility that is as haunting as it is dreamy.

This must be my reckoning: to suffer through an existence absent of you. Cursing the reality of death, looking for someone to blame – there must be someone to blame. There is nothing inside of me where you used to be – what purpose does it serve to take you away? A shift. A change. A beginning I will forever resent. To have loved another sibling and lost another again is to repay I debt I hadn’t known I owed the universe, but it came due, nonetheless.

Letter

On the car ride home, I wrote a note to my father,

recycled notebook paper my confessional,

Baba, he touched me – except I couldn’t say where –

or how the man who shares the blood of my

mother pursued his fix for me. That note with four

words – to touch is to impart sensation. Yet when he

in all his muck touched me his hands were

bricks against my hips, his tongue a snail

inside my mouth. Baba, he touched me – that note

with four words – to touch is to feel. Yet when he molded

my delicacy like sculpting clay virgin mother into all the wrong

places – I felt hardened after an evening in the kiln of his bedroom.

What was I saying? My father had to park the car, as I

started again, explained how the thought of someone’s touch

is too sensitive because of the way my uncle left me: how

suddenly that note – everything before it – had gone wrong.