Revisitation

Joyful

182 words

Sarah Van Name

i felt your joy in the songs i taught you to sing and in your condemnation-turned-acceptance of thong underwear, i saw it in pictures (first appearance of snow), you rushed through all of us in two weeks like a strong August storm, you had a life outside of this, you shrank away in the distance until i no longer recognized your voice on the phone, i still have the voicemails and there i hear the joy skimming over the sorrow, a pale stone jumping over the surface of the deep water

i can no longer hold you in the arms of summer: your smirk from my wall, the Hawaii glass, you are psychoanalytically something more to me than a skinny little girl drenched in light – psychologically, you represent the mosquito nights and the crushes – your breath, i didn’t know you at all when you were almost seventeen and decided, i only knew you at thirteen, a skinny little girl –

“I still write about her,” my friend said to me as we walked in the dusk. “Still.”

“I know,” I said. “Me too.”

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