poem for when grief feels like a candle you refuse to let burn out because what is left when it is gone?

LCD Soundsystem has a song called When Someone Great is Gone

and it's jaunty and boppy and it makes me cry and then bop some more

and makes think of your eclectic closet full of every texture and style and color,

and that since you've been gone, girlhood went with you,

and I miss you both with a sickness and with a rage that I have

tucked in a drawer.

I have a note on my notes app called "I Miss You" that I add to

everytime I want to text you, because I think your parents have

your phone, and I know they never let the battery die.

I tell you about Tiktok bebot and kikay trends, and gossip

that you would have died about and asked me endless details

which made you the best to yap with, and there I tell you everything

that makes me miss you, and why I don't really want to listen to

The 1975 anymore but I do it because it hurts and the hurt feels good

somehow.

I tell you what I'm mad about all this time after- what I'd be mad about

long after you would have let it go, because you, like your parents, were gracious.

I'd tell you how pissed off I was that no one round-tabled your obiturary

that someone wrote you were a "sewer of life".

They meant someone who sewed, like thread. But c'mon.

It reads like sewer! Sewer! That was crazy! You'd have been pissed!

Also the hell did "sewer of life" even mean! I guess you kept a

hell of a lot of house plants alive and could fashion a look- but like....what???

Maybe you would have just belly laughed, because you could do that with anything.

I would choose permanent hang nails for the rest of my days

if I could hear your laugh one more time.

Small mercies, I tell myself: You didn't have to hear "Life of Showgirl"

and you didn't have to know how bad this country has gotten, and

you didn't have to experience anymore pain or heartbreak or ennui

or confusion how everything and everyone has changed and how

things you insisted were true have since shown their true colors, and I

wish so badly that the good you saw in the world was what it really was.

It's been a year and some change, but what is that compared to a

friendship that began in middle school? Where do all your stories,

and inside jokes, and favorite karoake songs, and moles on your shoulders,

and late night sleepover whisperings, and gorgeous singing voice,

and best hugs, and deep desires- where do these all go? I put them

in the notes app whenever they come to me out of nowhere

and I cherish them, because you don't have a gravestone, and your

devoted friends are trying to get you a bench in Eagle Creek, so I will

take them all there, and I will take them to brunch and I will

take them to your parents, and I will share them, like we shared

makeup and secrets and then I will miss you something fierce

and be grateful I ever had a friend like you at all.

*circa 2013 and wildly unfair how photogenic some people got to be