_____

_____ word, she told me later, was ‘red.’ I began language with her favorite color. The shade of her suffering, the way my hands ached with potential around everything breakable. 

_____ thing she did after I told her was hug me tight. She said, “It’s not what I expected but I love you and I just want you to be happy. I just want you to be safe.” She said, “Let’s not tell your dad for awhile, okay? He might not understand.”

_____ wig I helped her pick out had feathered bangs. There’s a photo taken in a room of my old house, her hands clasped together, little raisin eyes shining bright. We were all hopeful then and believed in clinical trials. We used words like “promising.”  

_____ time I heard myself make that keening sound, more of a wail. I crumpled down the wall on some sunny morning in a conference room, phone to my ear, words garbled through my father’s guttural sobs. Her post-surgical scans revealed countless points of light. We were at the end of known science. “There is no other option,” he said. The cancer had renewed its fury, filling her gut. She had three-to-six months at the outside. 

_____ injection I gave her had to be carefully navigated around the tumors. A litany: Swab. Stretch the skin taut. Slow and steady without flinching even when she made those little animal sounds.

_____ visit to a body that was no longer hers. The bed was so low. Her hands were the same. 

_____ antidepressant sat on my nightstand for two months before I swallowed it.

_____ home she would never visit.  Cardinals infested the thicket outside my bedroom window, slashes of red in the winter months. 

_____ new song I knew she would have loved. Unbearable in its upbeat crooning.

_____ shrine. I brought home flowers and feathers and beautiful things she would have liked. A pink camellia with the edges already browning.

_____ birthday afterwards I stayed up all night and burned every candle, convinced I could reach her one more time. Tell her how sorry I was. So sorry. I should have clipped her toenails like she asked when she stopped being able to reach. I should have recorded everything. I should have been there when she left.

_____ anniversary I let myself listen to the only message with her name. Twenty seconds of silence, then, “I was listening for a tone. I never heard a tone. I don’t know.” The only way to hear her voice now. 

_____ taste of crematorium ash more than a year later. What was left of her fluttered into a cold lake in Colorado. All our fingertips dusted from putting her someplace she loved. Later, alone, I licked mine clean. 

_____ used the past tense regularly three years into her absence. She was. She was kind and patient and haunted and complex and she was only 55. Never made that _____ trip to Hawaii or her _____ volunteer home build.

Now I collect them, savoring every _____ she should have had for the rest of the life she left behind.