To Rose Ann

My Dearest Rose Ann,

My hair is longer than it used to be – the grey curls up over cracked ears and shakes in slight autumn winds. You used to cut it for me every two weeks after Church with your father's old barber set while explaining that I couldn’t let my hair grow out because if I died tomorrow, I’d “Look like a twat.” 

I hoped I’d go bald but you prayed harder than I did. So here I sit with my hair growing over my ears and down over the collar of my red polo. The same polo that you had me wear every Sunday.  

My hands haven't seemed to age. Maybe it’s the shroud of time passing as slowly as it does or the fact that I don’t remember what my hands looked like when I could fish for hours on the end of our rusted dock until the stars scattered and twisted the lapis sky. 

When did my hands lose the feeling of yours in them? When did that finally happen? Where my empty hands ached for your skin and so they shook with fear that my sweet Rose would never come back and cut my grey curls over my cracked ears. When did I slip from your rotting mind? When did your memory cut me loose from the stem of your brain and whisper softly as it left a void in your whimsical consciousness?

I have grown spiteful. It’s not my fault – the shadow of you still hangs under each doorframe, each window, behind closed doors with the oven light pouring essence onto the floor, it seeps under like cool water on the morning lake. You send rock ripples through with every gentle step. When I chase your presence through our home you tease me like a child. Running from room to room yelling my name to yourself; leaving me with the echo of meaningless words.

I can’t lie to you, Rose. There has been something on my mind to make me spiteful and mad and cruel. In days to come my intentions will become entirely clear. I will clean out the gutters of my mind for you to inspect and know their clutter and dirt– wash my hands and shake the dust off my wires. But even after all of that, I know it will be hard for you to bare witness and endure. And in your incredulous ways, you will deny it. But I need you to know, Rose Anna, this rarity of a life has come and happened. It’s taken its turn, left its crater in the moons of time, and bounced off into the infinite, away from the light of any star. In a week, next Sunday, I turn eighty. Eight decades is more than most and it was not meant for me. Sad, exhausted, left alone to rot away. There's no foot room. Nowhere for me to stretch my cramped soul – kick out my knee-ached legs and push out my tight arms. 

Our home shrinks and doesn’t feel like ours anymore. It’s gotten dirty in my laziness and has begun to croak under my shifting weight. It interrupts the natural silence of my hidden days. It’s grown to life: shivering in the cold, sweating in the sun. ​​Breathing and relaxing, gripping and tensing. Projecting, through the closed shutters, hazy illusions of beating hearts and pulsing arteries. 

But please, I beg of you, don’t blame me. I know you wouldn’t do the same but you had a way about you. Your voice left that gentle harmonious ring at the end of words and became music. Your suppressed Southern accent would wander through sentences and flatten itself into blank pages. Consonants and vowels would contort and fall onto the sheet as eighth notes. Quarter notes and half notes fell from question marks and periods. And the symphony played with the young conductor, dressed in his black tuxedo, gently closing his eyelids and bouncing his hands (his right holding the baton). Even when you were sick and your voice felt the scratch down in your throat, it still whispered like soft piano keys. When you would walk down the street on a cold evening, people would come out of their snow-shaken homes to watch the lone caroler sing of college football hot dogs and early Simon and Garfunkel albums. 

I was always the one broken violin string, the rusty trombone player; an unfriendly gust of wind to blow the sheet music just out of view. 

I can feel the imprint you leave on the end of our bed while I sleep. Sit closer to me. All I could ever need before this life is over is to feel our bed dip down in the middle. To know that you are there next to me, gripping the blanket away from me and drooling on the sheets. Kick me off the bed one last time. Let me look at you through tired eyes and still love you. I'll sleep on the couch so that I don't have to wake you.

I write this to you in hopes that you can give me what I wish for. One last moment. Even if it's just in the time of a hair falling to the floor, that will be enough. Talk to the gods. Whatever demon or devil that captured you in the afterlife. Barter with them. I will give my soul to eternal damnation. I will sit in hellfire with the flames engulfing me from the inside out yet never melting me. I will push the boulder for Sisyphus, take eternal torture for Prometheus, and carry the heavens for Atlas.

My love for you has never wavered. Never faltered, or fell through the holes in my heart. I have loved you through death and now my only wish is to see you again.

If they refuse me, then I will see you again in one week's time, my dear Rose Ann. I love you and will always remain,

Your Love