I wonder about the orange groves now that he’s no longer there to tend to them. I wonder about his next incarnation, if we’ll know each other when we meet. I wonder if he can see me crying into this godless air, imagining the sweet relief of scissors and kitchen knives and highway trucks. Let’s stay together, suspended between two kingdoms. 

I wonder where my heart is and whether sorrow is earthbound.

In the mornings, I smolder inside. It’s a hot blueish sustenance that flickers and falters but never extinguishes. And all your fortune tellers are blind. I keep a list of all the days we make each other cry. Every time I see a calla lily in the wild, I tell you that it is the fiercest of flowers, that it always finds a way, that it is a clean heart, singular in its grace, in its indignant fury. Do you understand me? I can see for the first time.

No one can hold my hand again.