The last four months and nine days you were gone were unforgiving. The days came by in waves, the type to throw punches, that I developed a routine of swimming to keep from drowning. But it always ends in defeat.
See, you took the air and only left your breath—
a single whiff of a scent so familiar, the very one I've breathed in and choked on one too many times.
I try to come to the surface and gasp for air, but you are in all the rooms of this house, in every nook and corner, like stubborn dust accumulated over the years between cabinets. Your breath is painted over walls, and yet I can only forage my memories in hopes of there still being something, anything I had kept of you to help me swim through the currents. I hoped you'd have a crumb of kindness remaining in you, so that I'd have been left with a choice, apart from these mocking traces of your simultaneous existence and non-existence.
You are just as unkind as the waters.
I still swim your rivers and drown in your sea.
