Future Story

I want to write a story
I'm not sure where to begin.
Do I start with the day I said that I loved you
or the day, years later, you told me the same thing?
Do I go into detail about the chivalry you displayed?
Do I describe having to go to the doctor to fix what you did?
Do I tell about your arrogance and ignorance when you told me there was no God?
Do I talk about your preaching the gospel with relish?
The story would become a book, maybe too much for my mother to read.
She would have to turn away from the pages and gasp
Others would say "No one knows what she lived through."
Or maybe, "There is no way that is all true."
But it is.
I could never make up all the ways you changed me, shaped me into who I am.
There is no fiction like this.
I want to describe it all so I can read myself and then I will know how to feel
about you and life and death and survival.

Troll under the Bridge

Those times you lay on the couch and I on the love seat and our hands would touch and we left them that way because we wanted to.
I thought you'd always be there for the rest of my life.
I didn't know I had more time than you.
The sand in my car there weeks after,
Simpsons every night,
Sundance films,
I'd slap your face even though I knew you'd hit me harder,
It still felt pretty good to slap you.
Jokes always, even not funny ones,
Grey flannel and Polo,
Edisto Island, always Edisto.
Signing that petition like it mattered.
Peaches and boiled peanuts.
I knew you'd never be the same...
Suddenly I allow myself to remember the good things that were overshadowed by your devastation path before.
I forgot so I could survive and now I remember...
Like a troll in my head that only comes out when the town stops trying to crucify him.
That troll is out.
He sits on his bridge and weeps and mumbles
all the things that were good about us.

Definition of Gone

Gone
Wind through the fingers, riding in the car.
Eyelash you wanted to wish on.
Stone you decided to skip.
That one sock.
Book you loaned to the wrong person.
Necklace you dropped in the wave.
On the tip of your tongue.
I am the soul rememberer.
I am all that knows what the picture of the feather means.
I am the survior of you.
I am all the stories now.
Because you are gone.