Fiction: Not Departed

I do this so you can wrap your palms around the leathers of my spine long after I am gone. I do this so that I can live on and on in the silent whispers that warm your mind’s waking hours like the early dawn. Your body can hold nothing of me. It is my duty to provide you with something to take, like a pill. A placebo. For comfort. Something to fill you, besides my absence.

When was it, you might ask, that every street corner shook itself out of its concrete foundations and from cracks and weeds birthed carnivals of memory? Was it not merely asphalt and atmosphere yesterday? Was not this sidewalk just a path to you before? A means of making your way to the side of my bed at end of the sterile green corridor? Wasn’t the sidewalk just the sounding board for the leather soles of your torn brown shoes? You thought I couldn’t hear, but I did. The staccato tap-tapping you stepped every weekday morning and swish-swish hush, the sound of the weights on both our bodies dragging their invisible metals all the way home. Home: the place where I no longer rest, and you cannot manage to.

Did you think it strange, this transformation of city meat and matter from something to be stepped on and walked past into a towering monster of recollection?  I can see you, you know. Every time you pause, I too am standing there. I can hear your dry heaves when you’ve abandoned tears. The pause of between breaths when you’re hit with idea that I once was, and when I was, you were not alone. You remember the street corners where we impatiently, rhythmically urged the metal light boxes to turn green? You remember how quickly the light turned in our favor as soon as we looked away? Think of me like this. In a blink—after the flash of light spears your eyes but before the sorrow sends swallows and you seize up—that moment alone is ours.