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Description
It’s been a year and a half,
which is ridiculous.
It feels like only last month
I was crouched by your body
in the gutter across the street
from our San Antonio home,
half-collapsed in the bushes there
because I could not
hold myself up against
the strength of my own weeping.

I’m sorry I haven’t
written for you in a while.
I try not to think about you,
because when I do,
I imagine a bumper crashing
into my own forehead,
crumbling my skull inwards
and piercing my very identity—
and that line of thought
is good for no one.

I still dream about you
and think that you’re real—
and when I sleep in my own bed,
even though I’m surrounded
by warm, loving animals,
my neck is cold
where you used to curl,
and my ears ring
where you used to purr.

My positive psychology professor
told us that people need
something to forgive
before their grief can end,
but whom do I have to forgive?
The driver who struck you
must have been kind,
though I’ll never know them;
they moved you to that gutter
instead of leaving you
to be struck a dozen times more.

In theory,
I’m the only one to forgive.
I was responsible for you.
After all, it was my decision
to let you keep your claws.
Without them,
you could not have climbed
the fence out of the backyard,
and so you’d never have been
in the street in the first place.

But by that logic,
it is myself I must forgive,
and that is much too hard.
By the words of Emily Brontë,
I could love my murderer—
“But yours? How can I?”
And I want to love myself—
if I wholly took the blame
for your death,
I would both hate
and never forgive myself.

Description
It’s been a year and a half,
which is ridiculous.
It feels like only last month
I was crouched by your body
in the gutter across the street
from our San Antonio home,
half-collapsed in the bushes there
because I could not
hold myself up against
the strength of my own weeping.

I’m sorry I haven’t
written for you in a while.
I try not to think about you,
because when I do,
I imagine a bumper crashing
into my own forehead,
crumbling my skull inwards
and piercing my very identity—
and that line of thought
is good for no one.

I still dream about you
and think that you’re real—
and when I sleep in my own bed,
even though I’m surrounded
by warm, loving animals,
my neck is cold
where you used to curl,
and my ears ring
where you used to purr.

My positive psychology professor
told us that people need
something to forgive
before their grief can end,
but whom do I have to forgive?
The driver who struck you
must have been kind,
though I’ll never know them;
they moved you to that gutter
instead of leaving you
to be struck a dozen times more.

In theory,
I’m the only one to forgive.
I was responsible for you.
After all, it was my decision
to let you keep your claws.
Without them,
you could not have climbed
the fence out of the backyard,
and so you’d never have been
in the street in the first place.

But by that logic,
it is myself I must forgive,
and that is much too hard.
By the words of Emily Brontë,
I could love my murderer—
“But yours? How can I?”
And I want to love myself—
if I wholly took the blame
for your death,
I would both hate
and never forgive myself.