Loss from a distance

The sun is too damn bright. Glinting off shellacked California facades. The palm trees repulse me in their barren plastic perfection. I need cedar and fir so tall and thick I cannot see the sky. I need the sky, low, and grey and foreboding. I need rainclouds so heavy they envelop me. I need the grey, cold Pacific, salt water crusting on my cheeks. I need your head on my lap. I need your soft ears and your deep brown eyes. I need the humor of your silent commentary, prance in your step, mischievous eyes. I need every memory I have ever had of you. I need new memories of you. Which will not come. Because these are the last eleven minutes of your life.

I need your intuition. I need your head heavy on my lap when you knew I was drowning in sadness. Sadness is drowning me now. I need your head, your seal eyes blinking up at me. These masses of buildings, cars, people everywhere are suffocating me. I feel foreign, I don't recognize anything. I can't breathe. I need to be far from here. I need to be close to you. To hold you one last time because you only have one minute to live. I need to tell you right now everything you have ever meant to me. Because the seconds are ticking and there's just no time and I'm so very far away.

I need to be home. To watch your ribcage rising and falling in soft breath. Not lowering the still and rigid weight of a body that once ran with me into cold ground. I can't bury you here. California's hot desert dirt isn't the place for you. And if it's not the place for you, why am I here? There is a circle of mourning, of all the people who have ever loved you or been loved by you, because they are the same. They will gather in your house, with their toes in your carpet, still warm from your heat. And yet I am here.