I was taken that fall, before the years got lost somewhere
between your first ballet and your father’s death and the
hereandnow. If you had given me another chance, before I
felt your shears tear away at me, your eyes would have fallen again
to your father’s flannelled-wrapped arm draped over your shoulder.
Then you’d see his smile and your smile, and wonder how he didn’t know,
would never know, that you loved the way his cologne mixed with the
smell of cars he had worked on all day.
But you will say that I am lost, not laying in a trash can by your desk; I
Have no choice but to befriend your old chemistry papers, an old belly button
ring, a half-eaten granola bar and a folded Coke can. You thought I talked too
much, and you didn’t want to remember that a car could become a heinous piece
of metal and plastic and leather—not a shield from death. I reminded you of a time before
grief becoming deadfall for grief, especially when I was passed around in the white-laced
album, the distant relatives cooing about miracle of genetics. They’d asked you when I
was taken and you’d say 1995 as if years could truly be protected in plastic.
So you will sit at the kitchen table, because your mother will insist on it, and you
will watch but never participate in the painful project of reorganizing the photographs.
She will see the naked slot and ask about me and you will say that “Lost”, and we will both
brood that either way, it is the truth.
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