“The one after the dog,” I whispered, “that’s me,” barely holding back my tears.
I weighed the broken sadness of both our hearts and told her, " Ask yourself why you're still with me. "
"Her name was Alexandra," I said quietly, before I turned away from her parents forever.
The fading old coat still hung on the hook, but the footsteps that used to follow it had long since stopped.
When she opens it now, the paper crumbles a little more each year, and the words have become a whisper she can barely hear.
But I'm the one that got her last letter.
I've find myself tracing the edges of that absence, even though I've long since memorized the exact dimensions of what we couldn't manage to keep.
As he locked the door, he left his spare key under the mat, a small silver anchor for a house and a life that was already drifting away.
Drifting off one troubled night, he felt the familiar weights shift and begin to slowly, deliberately knead his flesh, thousands of tiny, independent pressures mapping out veins and bones beneath the fabric.
It didn't help, but so far I've passed three pearls.
He tells me he has some new medications that will help, but he warned me they're addictive.
My parents were thrown out by their family after that, because I'm sure their mother and father were understandably upset.
My grandchildren, you will never experience the exhilaration of struggle and growth, or the raw, terrifying beauty of an uncertain and unchosen future.
"I'm sorry to have become such an awful burden." I apologized to my exhausted daughter
Later that evening, I wondered at the workings of the mind as I typed the doctor's notes on her case into the system: "sixty-eight years old, never married, no children - suspect baseline of dementia."
Cremate me and scatter the ashes wherever when the cancer finishes me, because there will be no one present for a funeral for an idiot like me anyway.
I'm sorry about the body...
The note on the back, in a bold and vibrant handwriting simply said 'Me, 1985,' and I wanted so desperately to remember her story.
It’s been three years since your avatar went grey, and the silence of our shared digital world still rings louder than any spoken goodbye.
"I'll accept the job" I told the bored hiring manager, and felt my future disappear with my suddenly weary body behind the factory gates.