Twin Citians, please come to my Dear Brother book party at the Red Balloon on Tuesday, August 8 at 6:30 pm. I’d love to see you there!

The other day a wave of missing my friend John Zdrazil, who died two years ago, flooded through me and I just wanted to hear his voice and that big laugh. Feel the sun of his presence shining on me. So I picked up my phone and scrolled through a few of our many years of texts. My God, he was hilarious. And soulful. And smart. And he just loved me so much, exactly as I am, which is so rare in life.

I miss you, Z’driz, I texted him, and listened to the swoosh as it sent itself to wherever he is now.

Late that night I picked up my phone again to read more of our messages to each other, but everything was gone, erased, deleted, except those four words: I miss you, Z’driz. All our conversations, all our laughter, all the books we loved and everything we said about them, invisible now. Floating somewhere in the scrim between worlds.

How Often One Death, by Danusha Laméris

How often one death carries another. Like when
my painting teacher, Eduardo, died, and the cat

he’d had for years succumbed the same month
to the same rare ailment. Or how when they buried

my friend’s grandfather in Japan, the pond-full of koi
he’d tended all his life, sickened, turned belly-up.

Who or what is in our keeping? A house, unoccupied,
quickly turns itself, sinks earthward.

Long-married couples are known to give up
the ghost within hours of each other.

Think of the hum that holds the walls together,
the roof high, keeps the rot at bay a little longer.

As surely as we, too, are pinned here by others,
whose presence urges our cells to replicate, our lives

more single than we imagine. Even the woman
I can’t see, who lives in a studio on the other side

of the wall. She washes a dish and the water runs through
the pipes between us, like blood through the arteries

of a single heart. 

Click here for more information about the wondrous Danusha Laméris.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter