K. Sulla

Crooked fingers steady themselves on my aching shoulders. A whisper of a feeling I used to know the way lungs know fresh air and feet know solid ground. I stretch myself back searching for her hands,
her voice,
her scent
but the harder I try to remember the faster she runs away from me, the faster the memories fade.
I stare at unlocked doors holding my breath and tapping my toes waiting for you to breeze in, to walk through and call out my name but you don't.

You can't.

I pick up the phone wanting desperately to describe each and every minute detail of my mundane monochromatic life to you but you don't pick up.

You can't.

We once spoke of the Great Green Garden in the Sky. A place where baby boy blue and fresh never-stepped-in-snow white hydrangeas bloom through the thick frost of a life frozen in time.

Do you still cry out in pain?
Do you still moan in your sleep like a baby crying for his mother?
Or do the spirits soothe you with sweet soft lullabies, singing to you the way I once did?
Or did you simply leave that pain here on Earth with me?

Perhaps its no longer you I hear screaming in her sleep, crying out in the middle of the night, feeling the white hot burn of a pain one cannot fathom.
Perhaps it's me now.
Perhaps that's why sleep evades me.
Perhaps the tumors that ate your life are hungry for more so they moved onto serving my memories of you as a late lunch.
Perhaps that's why I can't hear your voice anymore as I dream of songs sung in a different life by a different girl in a different time.

That poor girl who doesn't see the truck that's about to run her down, the girl who's heart was light, untainted by an unimaginable loss.
That poor girl who learned to take responsibility for all of life's sorrows and suffering for if she had only been better maybe you'd have stayed, maybe things could still be good.
That poor girl who looked the universe deep in the eyes and said "blame me. Take me." Because maybe that way noone would have to feel the hurt that her world is wrapped in.
This girl with paint on her hands and a song in her heart. With aching shoulders and missing memories. The girl that stares at doors and waits by phones and listens for your last words to ring in her ears like the church bells did at your funeral while she buried her face into her father's chest to drown out the sounds of her own sobs.

"Man." You said with your crooked fingers resting on my aching shoulders, "I am going to miss you"