Sisters

 

It’s your birthday and I wake up thinking of you, but you are not here.

I wonder what you would be doing now….what we’d be doing for your birthday, everyone getting together but there’ll be no birthday fun, no gathering, you are not here..

Only absences remain, all the people-shaped spaces I move through, only ghosts, breathing through the passing, distant years, as I remain while so many are gone.

I see people you were at school, college, with and though cruel, I stare at them with anger and think, why are you still here?? How come you have endured?? It’s not their fault, but when I see them it emphasizes your loss, your departure too soon, our togetherness cheated, while they are still here, so alive, all this time when you are gone so long and the age-old whine comes, ‘it’s not fair’ which makes me cringe even as I think it because I know too well that life is not fair, so not fair, yet still the words spit into my mind, pointless, impotent and hollow; because you are not here.

Your name engraved in the metal, frozen forever never looked right; it jarred, never seemed real, not the you I grew up with, not the you I lived with, got drunk with, went out with, laughed with, cried with; this was someone else, some imposter, some other you, but still you are not here.

Flickering memories filter in and out through the day, sneaking their way in as I move through this present moment, all we shared, all we endured, all we lost, rises up in me like an old film, playing over and over, the good and the bad, the game playing out.

As I watch the chem-trails seep across the sky, swallowing all the blue, as the death-cult madness digs in ever deeper in this spiritual war I can’t escape or ignore, today I think of you, of us, our stumblings through life, all we didn’t know, but the love and togetherness that’s not lost, cannot be lost even though you are not here.

Everyone loses those they love, that’s life; people, animals, all die in the end. Everyone thinks their loss is greater, harder because it’s theirs and for each of us it is; we can’t escape it, can’t pass it on, it’s ours to carry for the rest of our journey and we live with those no longer here.

You are gone, but you were, you are, part of each other always because everything is part of everything…..and I know this, but…..you are not here and I miss you.