Twenty

 Well, good morning, my dear.

Yes, it's early, isn't it? Blame that damn cat, yowling to go out in the small hours. If your little sister would leave her hallway door open the wretched creature wouldn't have to wake the house trying to escape and I wouldn't be sitting here, lit by only a phosphor screen waiting for my coffee to brew.

Would you like some? It's Colombian, lovely, deep and dark, rich and earthy.

Do you like coffee?

That's one of the many, many things we'll never know about you, though, isn't it?

Would you have been a coffee drinker? Were you smart and sweet, or funny, sad and blue, calm or quarrelsome, happy and bouncy or grim as the death that took you today, this day, twenty years ago.

Your birthday, love. The only one we ever had.

Here. Have a cup, anyway. I'll put a dollop of sweet cream in it to cover the bitterness.

Good? I hope you would have liked it. I'd have liked to share this moment with you, your dark hair frowzy from sleep, your eyes heavy, your hands warm and smooth around the cup, here in the darkness we'd share.

I'm sorry that we only have this night.

Tomorrow you'll be gone again, gone as you always are, running on before me across that bourne from which no traveler returns. We have only tonight, your birthday night, to sit together and remember the you that could have, should have been.

Your mother and I miss you, dear. She the you that was, me, the you that never was, the you I'd hoped to watch grow straight and young and tall as I grow stooped with age.

That's good, eh, the coffee?

We still have the rest of tonight, until you have to go. So let's sit here, love, and listen to the sound of the rain that falls in the dark, falls like the tears I've wept for you, lost and gone these many years like the steam from a coffee cup, swirling and rising and vanishing like the night as the dawn spreads across the sky.

Bryn Rose Gellar
March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002