"Don't look," you said, so I looked.

Found your stab wound beneath a dozen records you'll never listen to.
The blood an inkblot from a pen your father gave you, boxed in by bedsheets
your mother bought a week ago, a few post-its. Recognized her handwriting;
recognized better how these people beat themselves into every part of you,
even your words. Especially your words. Remodeled bones who never saw a doctor,
remodeled kitchen your mother threw her teeth into like a last meal, remodeled future
you had the good sense to dive out of. They owned you always, hands on your shoulders,
eyes on your crown, all their good parts siphoned off into other versions of themselves:
paper dolls. And even those did their damage.

Your mother says it's my fault, but I don't believe in hitting
if I don't have to. She says it's my fault and lets me in anyway, sends her eyes after me
to stare over my shoulder into your room; I guess that's as close as she's ever been.
Unkind? I don't care; I'm only here to take back of you what I can. Maybe she knows.
Stepping into your room, I close the door with my foot, drift to your window where you stood
three days ago, talking to me with flashlight signals, trying to tell me how lonely you were,
how you fit into the puzzle but never into place. How you loved me anyway.
If that was okay. How even if I loved you back
it wouldn't be enough.

I do love you back. I love you front. I love you underground
though I can't reach you there without breaking at least three different laws.
"What do you know?" Your mother spits the polite sort of prejudice. Not about skin.
Might be that I'm a girl. Hard to tell. People keep saying you did it for the
wrong reasons. Why not bare your scar? But I know; you were more the bearing kind.
The letter under your records and the dust stowing away on my shirttails and the
cold aloneness of the sun through your window. These were not wrong reasons; they were just
reasons. You know you don't have to worry. I can't keep a secret to save
my life, but I'll keep this one
trying to remember yours.

We look better when I sleep. Sometimes you are so old
I barely know you. Laugh lines. A few more scars. Evidence of
someone who let the wolves in your room once. On purpose. But it's you.
Moonlight though, so I know even asleep: this is the age under your bed.
Anyway, you're in your nineties I think. I'm braiding your hair impossibly small,
adding Baby's Breath and calling you Your Majesty. I sing you lullabies,
not because I'm good but because you ask. Then I blink, drop years
like accelerated weight, the body thrown into zero gravity for an hour. You too.
Beneath us a rickety bridge that smells like summer even in December,
beneath us the trickling stream saying it's actually June,
the fireflies concurring, your pudgy elbows,
my stick-bug legs, the swell of your face,
the blood on my back - things
we both thought we could handle. You mimic the rickets and I
mimic you. We laugh and look better until it's time to go home.

This room is a mess but mine is worse. Yours resembles art.
Mine suggests an inability to let go. Being here doesn't help my case.
Here, your flashlight. One of those slim, metal ones with the trending
bright colored exterior, heavier than expected, batteries dormant down its throat.
Then not. Off. On. Off. I slip it into my bag with: your letters, your camera,
your first three bedside books, your blue shirt more hole than shirt, your glasses.
Broken. (I remember we tried to fix them.) I can't fit the records. Now
no one will listen to them. I wish you were the kind of person to keep a journal.
Selfish me asks why you couldn't let me have that.
Too easy, you might say on a mean day.
Too much, you would say on an honest one.
Nothing else to do here but I sweep through again just in case.
Not an afterthought: I turn on your nightlight before I leave, and for a minute
you return in the lights on your walls.

I keep promises better than secrets. Your body will grow an apple tree
and I will live in its branches, tell you stories. They'll really just be me talking
about my day but how else would you know? I'll tell you other things too:
how they made Pluto lonely like you, how the people we should have loved but never met keep dying,
how some days I hate you because you never learned to talk back. Then I'll read you stories,
which is different from telling. (We talked about this.) You will have to deal with
my Hemingway moods and seventh childhood, but it won't matter. All these have the same end.
In your tree I'll spend hours memorizing constellations with one of your books.
I'll swear to name one for you if I ever have the opportunity.
Before the tree there will only be roots. Seeds and roots. Seeds and roots and bad days,
bad days that are long days made of trying to understand the emptiness to my right.
Give me your hand. But you can't. Won't be able to. I'll understand but sometimes
it will rain and I won't be as grown-up as we both wish I was. Sorry for the screaming.
Sometimes I just can't stand you. My first broken part will come from forgetting small hands
always lose to headstones. The rest won't seem as important - proof you'll still be there
for the big things. Firsts. Lasts. The teeming in-between. And someday apples
falling like hearts where you're sleeping.

This town hates sadness so I stay out of its way. It's fine.
It's all
fine.
Even gone, you're still enough for me.