#37

The end of things was a nursing home with thick blue walls and carpets, hid in an unmarked building on a dangerous street in the city. I had travelled many lives to reach it, and these lives walked purposely through its corridors. Each had a message to relay. My grandmother in partnered calisthenics. My mother and brother at the restaurant table. Or at the bookstore, where Ed reached for a journal, Daedalus. "The kind of thing you do at school," he said.

But it was Caroline who spoke in subtle boldface, as she washed her hands beneath the bathroom mirror. My father dead, and she remembering. Two pills in a plastic container, each printed with a tiny zed. And she smiled as she retrieved one, the light flooding gently through the parted curtains. I heard her when she spoke, but it was for him she meant the words, softly and with joy: "I have carried these all my life. I might as well take one now."

The riddle was written in prose. Her words, dismembering parentheses. And my time so seen, reflected in my parents' verse, revised. I ever the child to their childhood, lagging behind in reasoned indignation. My father the winder of clocks whose hands I trace and tally in determined sums. How can my loss be much as theirs and cherished? For I still climb with hasty grasp the summit of my will, where no teller of tales will commit my story to writing. And you tell me, when you tell me, to stray.

And here, in the present tense, I take heed of such endings. And sit down, as if to translate: the time spent in time offered to another. I walk zigzag patterns through the day, assemble arduous compromises in my record book. I sit in a chair and read, and look up from my story to see you. A reflection on the sofa across, dogeared paperback open. As if to say, when your eyes meet mine and settle: I am emptyhanded here without you.