It’s unfair, Irene.

It’s unfair that you leave behind a few sentences, that you think that I wouldn’t take all the time in the world to listen to your slow, struggling words as you let me know what was on your mind. What was behind those sad but ever-beautiful eyes of yours.

All I get is seven short lines written in a shaky hand, when I want more; from you, I always wanted more. With you, I want nothing less of everything you have to say.

Do you know how much I cried when they called me to tell you that you called out my name? That you never smiled when I wasn’t in the room? Do you know how incredibly numb I feel as they lower your small, small body into the unforgiving earth, where the only things that will listen to your gentle voice are some stupid ants and worms? What will you tell them? Would you tell them all the things you didn’t tell me?

What do I do with these ears? This perceiving mind? My shaking, longing fingers? There’s no you anymore to laugh maniacally or make everything go blank or provide comfort. There’s nothing to miss, because you’re just gone, and once something’s gone, you no longer miss it in that physical sense, in that horrible longing for tangibility. You imagine it. You draw up abstractions from your mind of what had been there previously; you think you can reach out and pretend it’s real, convince yourself for just a split moment that nothing has changed, but in the end, you can’t miss memories, you miss the way you lived those memories. You recall things through the small souvenirs and wide, empty spaces. It’s a projection of the past in those hollow physicalities. Imagination.

But I don’t want to imagine the words left unsaid. Those words, those w