I am alone in the house, writing the book you always told me I could write--if I just believed in myself—when your mother calls out of the blue to tell me you died. Your name bounces in my head, my mind flipping backward, until my heart conjures a sweet bearded face. I hear only fragments of what your mother says next. New York Presbyterian Hospital… Complications of hemophilia. Memorial service in a few weeks. Lost my boy!

Words of comfort stick in my throat. I do not tell her I still love you.

After we hang up, I call the hospital and ask for your room. The patient has expired the receptionist reports. I want to reach through the phone and strangle that voice. It was you, wasn’t it, making those silent phone calls to me weeks before? How had I not a sliver of female intuition or psychic dream, foretelling me your days were folding?

Why did I not even say your name?

A river of tears flows but does not wash away the fact that I let so much time pass, that I stopped writing, stopped calling.

Thousands of sunsets have passed since you first showed me the ocean on a Cape Cod beach beneath a full moon, as if you had placed it there. The rhythmic dark waves lulled. I remember the cool sand beneath my nimble feet. I feel like doing a cartwheel! I said. You cheered, Go for it! Your mantra. You, who walked with a limp, who had dodged death more than once. Go for it! And I did.

I told you I felt old at twenty and didn’t want to celebrate my next birthday. Days later, you surprised me with a copy of the front page of the New York Times from the day of my birth, rolled up with a pink bow. I’m so glad you were born. Always remember this: the one with the most birthdays lives the longest.

How foolish I’d been back then, when I was beautiful, to fear another birthday. Your tally: thirty-five.

I won.

What to do now with the cards, letters, and photographs growing old in the heat of the attic? I hold your favorite picture--me in a red and black swimsuit, zipper up the front, posing on Nauset Beach. I don’t recognize that slender girl with the delicate wrists—the girl you rescued from the dark wave. My eyes cloud seeing the photo of our fresh faces smiling from atop the Twin Towers, the city unfolding behind us under a sky as brilliantly blue as that future September 11th day neither of us could imagine. Who knew? This is what we utter after earning the gift of perspective that comes from accumulating birthdays. Who knew then that our love would crumble under its own weight, that we would not reminisce in middle age?

Remorse and Regret pierce my heart. Sister emotions, like a musical chord, their individual timbres hard to distinguish. What were our odds of happily-ever-after, anyway? Our youthful rhapsody hit so many wrong notes. Yet we played it over and over, like a favorite scratched record album. For too long now, I’ve lived in the shadow, singing my own refrain. If only…what could have been? A lyric from a thousand sad songs.

Now, after all these years, I feel your sudden presence like a butterfly brushing my arm. I breathe in your whispered words and form a new melody.

Go for it. ~