i met you at her funeral. you just held onto me and cried. you told me i was beautiful, and looked just like her. you couldn’t look at me straight, you just held my arm for a while.
i remember when she told me about her blackest years, when i was still swallowing mine. we were in a hotel restaurant before an international flight and my guts were on my breakfast plate. i was just twenty-two, just heartbroken, just. she sat across from me and told me those secrets that belonged to you two. to you, too. she belonged to you, too.
i remember your brother sitting next to her in hospital, crying. she said, tell neil i loved him. make sure he knows that i really loved him. my father sat at her feet and smiled. he knew that her heart had not always been his, but he also never doubted the clarity with which he was loved from the start.
i bit the skin on my lips and thought, as your old fingers pressed my skin. you never get yourself back from the people that you love. you always leave something behind, like a broken fingernail in between their teeth.
sometimes i look at this picture of my mother and her first real love and i wonder what i have left in the men that i no longer hold. sometimes i hope that you remember the eyelashes you counted underneath i-love-you’s. sometimes, though. only sometimes.
