by S Vitrolica

Created on: July 13, 2009

I would like to continue writing to you in the form of a letter, or with a voice, soft and meaningful, playing words that echo their closeness and understanding, but I am not sure if you can hear. Mother told me it was a sin to speak to the dead, that their world was separated from ours for reasons we should not ask to understand, and asking them to cross over could only bring sadness and evil.

I cannot think of you bringing such things. Would you?

When I wrote that letter, I thought of you, your eyes hovering over me as my pen gently glided over stationary. You always said that letter writing was a lost art, scoffed at any meaning that I could try to squeeze into an email, but if I wrote it by hand, on a postcard or put it in an envelope you saved it. I could have sent you a shopping list on the back of the Tower of Pisa and I'm sure it would have been in that box that was given to me after your passing, full of paper, words, and some souvenirs. But I never made it to the Tower of Pisa.

I'm not sure what to do with that box, it seems so clich in most places I try to put it. It started in my bedroom closet, on the highest shelf, all by itself, since below that shelf there was another shelf that I could actually reach to store things and I could never be bothered to drag over a chair or a stool to stand on. But bothered I was by the box itself, it didn't seem right there, or rather it seemed too right, like a scene in a movie, where I should climb high in a summer skirt and stretch my body like a cat, reaching, gently lifting it down, dusting it off, blowing on the lid and tenderly opening it, to reveal the contents hidden inside.

I never did that, but I kept seeing it play over and over in my head, like a scene from a movie, or a thousand different movies that each seem to share the same plot. So one day I did reach up there to get the box down, but I dragged up a table so that it wouldn't be like the image in my head, and I was barefoot in my underwear, and when I jumped off the table there was nothing feline in my movement, as my right foot landed on a tack and a chain of useless obscenities spilled out of my mouth as the box's contents tumbled out and onto the floor.

I lay there crying for such a long time afterwards. Why must our lives be so ordinary?

I moved the box, under the bed, but it didn't feel right there either. (Or once again, maybe it felt too right, for the scene, modified to fit into the changed circumstances, played itself out over and

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