Now that you are gone, at last, I can take these boxes of memories and drag them along the ground into the shade, for they are too heavy for me to lift. Just my memories now, all mine alone, now that you are gone, and I can hoard them as I wish. You left, you, always the black cat, the irritated black cat that suddenly jumped up to walk the fence line in another direction, moody and musing. You went too far, where the light bends inward in all directions, towards itself, but I was not close enough behind you, and now all I can see are the spaces in between the stars. The helplessness of all that, the inevitability, pumping busted brakes as the car flies through the intersection. Yes, that feeling, but I will tell you, not just that feeling, not just. Also the police barricade at night, the cordoned off detour through the residential street, one lane, cars moving slowly and politely, and where else do they do that, off course, the funeral procession. Darkened houses at that hour, drapes pulled, the unwanted, alien traffic that is denied. All these things in a loss. Well, that’s what you get. This box is falling apart, all I could find. I was never one for hoarding packing materials. Not that I don’t try. Boxes in my garage, like everyone else, alternately home to books and Christmas decorations and old clothes, cute shoes, but over time, (God, that phrase, “over time”, isn’t that one defeated and boring like an industrial landscape with sand and tiny jagged rocks crunching underfoot and power lines in the distance), over time the boxes get worn, soft, the seams bend and move in crazy directions, they are overfilled, and really, I ask you in all sincerity, what can you do but tape them up and drag them along the ground on moving day, because it’s moving day, time to get out. You might have. You might have gone to the store, done things the right way, bought the crisp new boxes that come flat in one sheet, tape required, not included. You might have drove around the back of the store, furtive, guilty, looking for a box near the dumpster…free, pre-assembled. However, it’s moving day, this is what you could find, you have to drag it if necessarily, no time to unpack it. The useless items are not evicted, instead they come along for the ride, like the neighbor’s child who is staying for dinner, out of your kindness and courtesy, eating too much, chattering, maybe knocking over a glass on the table while you smile with a fake, plastered smile. And this is a loss, and this is life. Wasn’t I duped when you died? Wasn’t that a great trick, the Vegas show with the magician in the tuxedo with the deck of cards, and wasn’t I there too, trying to figure out the trick when the lights went down, blinking suddenly in surprise when the lights went down? I was there. That was a good trick, I admired it. This is boring, now, though. I have to say. This is boring. I am not sure why, but it is the custom to put on these heavy woolen Victorian skirts, Woolf-like, pick your way across a rocky shoreline into a freezing inland sea. It’s cold, and for some reason you are hungry later, when the burial is over, then you go the relative’s house, sit on a folding metal chair and eat incongruous food, deli sandwiches and soggy green bean casserole, potluck style, because that is the hodgepodge of mourning cooking, the one who boils the comfort food with the television blaring, and brings it, and the one who cries to, inside of, and from the Walmart while throwing prewrapped hoagies into a dirty metal shopping cart. This, too, is the hodgepodge of loss, of mourning. I just can’t make put whether that chronology, the one that I am constructing, is in itself a dismissal, like buying a new boxes but transferring items without sorting, not really ordering or sorting or making things much better, but only putting items in a bigger, stronger box that will only hide the junk much better, make it seem that things are neat, stackable, even. Yes, boxes that you can stack from floor to ceiling in the garage, inaccessible, but perhaps appearing to be rightward moving, like a Costco warehouse with no ladders, labels, or pricing. A warehouse life. Because God knows that’s normal. Not. Not really all that normal.