My everything, I found your letter inside of a bottle, and didn't know what to say. It was broken further down the cove, ink spilt hallowed but such a shallow grave, read your poem like it was life in itself, starved for hope like the waters were too hard to navigate, but it figures that if I was going to build us a home, well then your heart would find its way.
It smelt of sea salt and your father's favorite poison. I'll never forget that day.
College-ruled lines clouded by the liquor, like a water-color painting that had absorbed the spectrum with blue, and hues thereof (or like a piece of bread to absorb the damage). That bottle of Seagrams shattered against a seashell and rewrote the story that it would tell to any little girl who might pick up that whitewashed tomb, expecting to hear the ocean, listening for the crescendo and the crash, when at last, she'll hear the echoes of your whispers:
"These bottles will carry my heart home, and the currents will be kind, and my lover's letters will return to me, and our children will grow to find that all is not for naught, and though all is not yet healed, their parents, they worked hard for it, and the storms honored their appeals to see that though my father's drowning, his bottles float above the waves, and though I used to dread the water, its waves will be faithful to crash every day (until at last, I see your face)."
Things aren't the same.
I've been picking up splinters of lumber for the floorboards and wondering about all our splintered promises, like even though we didn't have control over their breaking, oaths like those don't account for much.
I loved the beach for the way the breath of God rose out of the deep, and I hated the sand but I'd tolerate it to hold your hand and watch the sun sink into the sea, feet buried just beneath the surface, molten love buried just beneath the surface, erupting, volcanic, unable to keep beneath the surface that broke like our parents' dormant, surface-level crater of a marriage that looks more like a coffin every time I read the note that I stole out of my father's casket before it closed. He wrote it about my mother. A woman I never met, but it made me feel like I knew her, and this is what it said:
