The Seven of Cups, Tonight

Early this year, you came to visit me. We had a small number of hours before you would be on a plane heading to my hometown. You would walk on the same ground in the same museum I went to as a child on a field trip. You would go there and let the art absorb you. You would go there with a friend I had sent you to whom I've known since I was 16. You in the state I grew up in.  You who would be loved and taken care of by the people who love me.

(pause)

I took a picture of our shoes next to each other that night before you left: My gold foil kitten heels and your tan hide cowboy boots. 

Unknown to me, before you left in the morning, you stuffed a bundle of three sweaters into my closet.  Later that day, from more than half way across the nation you would text me and say that you couldn't fit them in your suitcase so you were leaving them with me for safe keeping.

I kept them for you.

In a tidy stack in my bedroom closet that was, otherwise, a mess.

(pause)

The night that I found out that you were dead I came home, took one of the sweaters out of my closet, wrapped it around myself and cried myself to sleep.

There are so many things to tell you.

Like how that night a few weeks ago, within the window of when you died, I was dreaming.  And how, while I was dreaming, I could feel you behind me. You, and another person, although I wasn't sure who it was. You were behind me and I was looking at a rural highway with a field of straw-like grass behind it. There were cops everywhere, but barely any street lamps.  Just the dark illuminated by the headlights of cop cars and multiple spinning red and blue. I didn't know what I was looking at, then. I kept staring and straining my eyes to see what it was that I was looking at, because I was standing too far away.  What was it that had happened?  Why were there so many police cars, and why was it so dark?  I turned my head gentle-but-reluctant to my shoulder.  I wondered why it was  that I could feel you behind me, but had not seen you yet.

I didn't know then what it was that I was looking at in my dream.  What was happening, or what would happen, a handful of states away.

I wouldn't know for another two days when Z called me from Prague and we tried to piece together why you were missing.

(pause)

I haven't been able to write here since I found out.

This is a medium that we shared.

I won't be able to look at the letters you've sent me, or the trinkets you've mailed me, or think- too hard or too much- on anything having to do with you too directly quite yet.

But I know you are around.

I listened to your last voicemail the other day.  The one from a few days before you died.

You announced who you were calling and who you were (as we both always did; as if we wouldn't know) and then said:

"I'm calling to sing you a song. It goes like this:

Do you believe in magic? That's all of the song I remember. I'll talk to you soon."




k.

(photo: A photo of the actual scene. It is identical from the vantage point, details and distance of what I was watching while I slept the night that you left this world in the form you were in. I awoke from this dream just before 2am that night. It was just before 4am where you were. The call to the police would come in at 4:30am.)