TWO

There’s still all this malarkey about the funeral. You’d hate that, but I think you’d laugh, too, watching them debate endlessly over something so silly as how to lay you to rest.

“I’m already resting,” you’d say, “And whatever parts of me remain aren’t for you to dismiss, or scatter to the winds. They’re for the remenoire to decide — what to do with me, or not to do, for that matter. Whatever they wish.”

But they’re not remenoire, not either of them, nor any of my sisters. It’s just me, now.

Dad’s certain he’s right, even if he fears he’s wrong. Thinks the perdesse have the most in common with the remenoire anyway, given that they value the bones of things the most, whether living or dead. Every time I’d ask him to come squash a fly, he’d have a quiet conversation with me first, asking if I truly felt ready to shepherd a soul into the next life. For a bug. I started shooing them out of my window after that instead, not because I really felt enlightened or anything — I just couldn’t handle that question at six, or even sixteen.

Somehow, I think I feel even less qualified now.

Mum, on the other hand, can’t understand a funeral without a celebration of life, but that doesn’t feel right either. It feels untethered, or disingenuous, maybe, like we’re only celebrating the parts of you that walked in the sunshine. I want to hold your favorite pocket square again, or run my fingers over the creased spines of your favorite books. I don’t want to wax poetic about you every time I read them, or wander through the halls mourning you with every breath.

I just want to feel you here.

I can, sometimes. I go into your study, lock the door behind me, bend down to smell the candles you always had burning. The lingering notes of sage and palo santo that would hang on your clothes hours later, that dusty aroma of scorched wick and extinguished flame, even the pipe tobacco you swore to dad “just kept turning up”… in those moments, it was like you were there in the armchair again, tapping your glasses against your forehead, sighing as I asked for stories of sandstone temples and silk laden ships for the hundredth time.

Is that magic, the means of conjuring you here, even just in memory? Something I could learn, too, if I could find someone to teach me? Is this your way of teaching me?

I don’t know. You’re gone. Maybe there’s a message in that, all by itself. That things go, that people leave, that our brightest days fade, and that even the longest and darkest night will surrender to the sunrise.

I wish you were here to tell me to go take a walk. To smooth the wrinkle out on my forehead with an ink-stained thumb, and say that that’s enough for one day.

I think that’s enough for one day.