Regret

First part written in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on 18 July 2003.

I wondered when I hadn't heard from you in months. I hoped you were well and that you felt safe in the night.

"Oh, she's dead," my sister said of you in passing, "He killed her."

I should have known, I thought, reflecting on the day he had said he was joking.

Do you remember the day we first met, when you lived in that strange person's house? You, who had been disregarded, loved me openly and thought our love natural. And me, dumbfounded, sitting there watching you, wondering whom to be.

He did it to hurt me for saying good-bye, you know. This was what I wanted you to believe.

Fast friends, I invited you to live with me. I didn't expect your strange man to agree. He neglected to mention your resistance to change; I lay in bed wondering if you were going to attack me that first night we shared a room. But your love proved strong, and in spending our nights with your memories of the fishing community that raised you, my love for you blossomed.

I was informed that he selected you for your beauty, and that you were torn from your mother with no one's consent. He pacified himself with the thought that modern civilization could offer you more than fish and family content. I agreed only as to your beauty, and while I sometimes envied your bones and skin, I see the price you had already paid for them far too high.

With ample means I would have brought you home and secured your birthright. However, our lives were basic ~ my beauty also attracted the worst of men's attention, I declined ~ and in basic living we shared such joy as I had unimagined. Do you remember playing hide-and-seek in our first deep snowfall? Or the many summer nights we set out to count the stars, lost track, and laughing we started over. You touched my heart most deeply that day you trusted me to hold you moments after a jubilant toddler had frightened you into peeing on the porch. In holding you holding me, we washed away all astonishment.

I am supposed to bury you, my heart, yet I know not how with the dust of your body gone and I, all choked, am still dust yet bound. When my endurance is past our matter may mingle ~ our reunion unknowing, unbeing.

Do you remember your first crush? You were in love with an actor. I admit to renting his movies when it was my time to study for exams. You ignored me in gay abandon, sitting alert with eyes dilated and throbbing pulse, focused.

It was his television that parted us. You had enjoyed his smell and I had permitted his charm, and when it came time to leave you asked to stay. Tempted to tell you no for you were too little to decide, instead and in love I indulged your crush and whim.

He did it because he envied us. This was what I wanted to believe.

I may always be unable to know why both men you knew needed to possess of you what inspired them, and in possession refused to see what destruction they had wrought. Would that I had made more of a difference, I filled myself with will stretched to reach past Death through Time to you.

For years it seemed that all that was is all that is: your absence cold and real. It seemed any god could have been kinder for then I would not have been alone with myself without you. I buried my heart thinking it you, and choked have been aghast and lost by what he had done with you, and so with me.

I indulged your choice because he promised me he would give you a better life than I could give you.

"He cried when he called me to say what he had done," said my mother, as though his tears could make your absence okay.

He did it due to forgetting his options. For some years, this was what I believed.

Second part written in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on 3 August 2011.


Dear heart, I have friends who have unburied you, and who ask me to accept they brought you to life and named you me.

He killed you to cause deliberate harm. This is what it seems I have been seeing.

I have met a heart and mind in whom I believe, who carried me here back to you as I once carried you home. For heart and mind I would re-write you, for you I would retain something real. When my friend seems harsh with me, I see he is being my friend more than I have been able to be mine ior his, however, I must by now be done with such constraints.

Wantsum.

If.

I prefer the one who killed you has his hopes and dreams forever. This new heart and mind in my life, who brought me home to you, we almost see our way through this question.