Rebecca Shurtleff

There is one memory that I cannot forget and it is the way you kept your shoes on the first time you came to say goodbye.

Somehow it is always Sunday morning. Somehow, April turned to June and you became a distant memory, replaced with better habits and a boy with warm eyes.

I read somewhere that your skin replaces itself every seven years – that who I am now is not who I was seven years ago; that one day, I will have a body you will have never touched.

I wonder when you started being able to fall asleep without telling me goodnight.

Being the one to leave doesn’t hurt any less, but it’s a different kind of hurt.

I remember telling you once that I wanted to live near the ocean, a beachfront home. You said you could never do it, that sharks scared you more than anything.