I Lost My Way There Once

Several weeks ago, out of curiosity, I went to my Facebook messenger to see if the messages between me and my late sister were still there. This was a mistake.

The poet Charles Simic died four days ago. A poet of pause and remember, his poems unearthed houses readying themselves for a journey. The spider and fly on the ceiling looked on.

The messages between my sister and me were severe in her final years. I pointed out her sadnesses and their whys. She pointed at me and elsewhere for her whys.

Charles Simic wrote of a closed, dusty store, a tailor’s dummy in its window. Clothes were pinned to its fabric-flesh. Clothes of a young child. The store looked to have been closed for years.

When I was 28 and she 37, I asked my big sister to keep me company. Instead, she told me to take a shower, make tea, and read a book.

Charles Simic wrote further about the closed-up shop, claiming I lost my way there once. Lost in a quiet like a Sunday’s afternoon light.

Lines and lines of her explaining her whys and her choices. She told me that I act like I am perfect. I told her I just don’t have anything to say.

“How do you like that?

I said to no one,” he wrote.

“How do you like that?

I said it again today upon waking.”

A person of pause and remember, I remember her bedside. The jaundiced bloat. The scratch of her colored pencil in her adult coloring book. Wiping my hands on my black and white dress after setting up her breathing treatment. Taking a break from her bedside, driving around, ending up with my nose pierced. Aunt Charlie driving into a snow storm to get her ice cream. The one bite she took of the ice cream. A person of pause and remember, I now drive and look up at Pennsylvania’s rolling hills and have sensible thoughts about turning leaves and migrating birds. Wiping my kitchen counter clean, sometimes I stop, remembering her delicate hands folding into finality. I tell colleagues that my sister had died as casually as I’d say that I had an apple for breakfast. I walk on River Road, tilting my head at the game trails entering the forest. Fleet-footed escapes.

Charles Simic died from a diseased memory. He felt himself to be the tailor’s dummy, feeling the prickling of the heavy darkness pinned onto his back.

“I don’t know if I have the right phone number…” she wrote finally. “…because your not responding to the text I sent to you or your just busy.”