"Remnants of You" by Shruthi Senthilnathan

I think of you more than I need to.

I don't know how to make it stop.

When I try to write, I find myself bursting with stories of you - tiny, infinite memories I can't seem to stop pulling from within me.

It feels like I have unspooled my coiled guts into ink

And turned you into prose.

I am four years old and you are acting like the characters in that cartoon I can't remember the name of now to make me laugh.

I am eight years old and you are lying down to sleep with bandaids on your arm after a long dialysis session.

I am two years old and you are feeding me tomato soup on a rainy day.

I am twelve years old and you are not there.

You didn't show up to our shared birthday.

You didn't show up to my high school graduation.

You didn't show up when I turned eighteen.

You will not show up when I graduate college.

You will not show up when I get married.

You will not show up when I have children.

Yet,

I will have to carry you with me, small pieces of you burrowed into my beating heart,

I will have to carry you with me through it all.

I see you in flashes of old men who give up their seats for their wives,

I think if I talk to them will they sound like you?

I see you in paan shops as betel leaves with red paste smeared in,

I think if I eat it will I feel like you?

I see you in ambulances that cross me everyday on the road,

I think if I let it run me over will I meet you?

I see you in my genetic code and the way I deal cards with a quick finger,

I think if I just deal it well enough will you come back?

I could never stop writing about you.

I have nightmares of forgetting you if I do.

I don't know how to lose this embolism of grief that exists within me with the remnants of you.

I let it cut me open from within and think is this how it hurt before you died.

I continue to let the pain move my hand across paper.

A word from the author: My grandfather passed away when I was 11, a month before the birthday we shared together. It's been seven years now, almost eight and I still don't know what to do with the grief inside me. I turn him into poetry and prose and hope it will fix me. It has not yet.