Your body is cold. You died on that day, that sunny day in May, and there is nothing I can do to bring you back. Sentence by sentence, I thought writing would allow me to find you again, to save you, and that a kiss on your forehead would be enough to wake you up. But your face is blue, and I don’t know how to revive you. So I’m just going to talk to you, the way you used to talk to Grandpa under the plum tree. All these years, you waited for me; you knew that as I made my way toward you, I would find myself. This book is yours. These paper flowers are your crown.
The evil he inflicted on you is inside me; I can’t loosen it. It’s like a granite boulder in the middle of a prairie. But now I know it’s there; now I remember, and I play, and romp, and whoop with my son until we collapse, exhausted from tickling and laughing, in the wild grass, and nothing is further away from me than those images of the past. Sometimes I wrap my arms around the man I love, and our bodies thrill with joy, and nothing exists in us but the joy of being alive.
Life never relents. In the deepest depths of the oceans, in the shadows, it gleams.
In my mouth, my throat, I feel the explosive sweetness of biting into a crisp apple. I feel, in my nostrils and all through my windpipe, the scent of pine needles rolled between my fingertips, the vibrant moistness of a handful of damp soil against my palm.