I was ten or eleven. My best friend was the same age. He was an only child but there had been a brother who died before he was born. I knew that death leaves a shadow, buries a bone somewhere even though there seemed to be no trace. No one can just disappear. I pushed open the door of the parent’s bedroom convinced this was the place to look. Sleep is a nakedness where you cannot hide. Dreams only distort the truth. The dead son was there, written into the grain of the polished wardrobe, coated on the back of its mirror, ground into a million fragments falling like dust through an ocean at a geologic pace too slow for our clocks. He would still be falling when the roof caved in, when the grass sprouted through the floorboards downstairs and nature came to wipe the slate of our lives clean.Birth sign: Libra
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