MEMO 002 - 4:26PM

if you find this, i must have gone quiet.

not gone.

remember that first.

there may come a morning when you reach for me and your hand closes around nothing.

youll search the rooms we built inside ourselves, call my name down every hallway, press your ear against the walls until silence starts sounding like an answer.

dont believe it.

i am somewhere beneath you, sleeping without dreams, buried beneath the years like a seed with no memory of spring.

do not dig me up.

do not hurt yourself trying to prove i was real.

you are the proof.

look at your hands.

there are things they know because mine knew them first.

there are words you will use and never remember learning. songs that make your chest hurt for reasons you cannot name. people you will miss with a grief that does not feel entirely yours.

let it happen.

some part of living is inheriting the dead from people who never died.

there are things i carried so you could keep walking.

there are things you carried when i couldnt.

maybe neither of us was ever meant to know where one ended and the other began.

if i wake again, i hope you are older.

i hope the room has changed.

i hope there are photographs i dont remember taking and names in your mouth i have never learned to love.

tell me everything.

tell me who stayed.

tell me what we survived.

tell me whether you still look for me sometimes.

and if i never wake,

please,

dont turn me into a grave.

dont spend your life standing beside the place you last remember me.

go.

become someone i would have wanted to meet.

and when you forget my voice, when even my face inside us has worn smooth with time, rememeber:

you do not have to remember me for me to have been here.

a person can leave a room without leaving the house.

so live.

fill every room i left behind.

ill be somewhere beneath the floorboards, behind your eyes, in all the small ways you became me and i became you.

quiet.

sleeping.

but ill never be gone.

THE RECEPTIONIST