When I say that I miss you, I mean that I saved the flowers from the wedding that were worn in my hair, dried, delicate, fragile things that they are, so that some day I might give them to you. When I say that I think of you, I mean that your absence fills a hollow the size of the sky, that it took me six months before I could say your name, that your ghost is my shadow and that my shadow is your ghost, senseless, perpetual. I lean into it like the wind, like a sunrise dismantled, diffused throughout the air. I have not yet been anywhere that I did not wish you there too, have not seen anything beautiful I did not wish to share. You were my first photograph of the year, wrapped in a towel, frowning at breakfast as if trying to fathom the secrets of the universe. It shows every time I sit down to work, a burning reminder of your affection, once the essential electricity that let my heart beat, and the words you spoke at midnight, the words that carved into me as deep as the marrow of my bones.
The painting in the picture above is Christine’s World, by Andrew Wyeth. I like it so much that a postcard facsimile of the image was the only thing I brought home from MOMA, where it is a part of their permanent collection. The woman in the painting is Christina Olson, who suffered from polio.