connie raze i flip to the pictures in the middle of a thick hardback book about your life. this is the sum total of everything anyone will ever know about you now that you're not around to speak for yourself. i make an effort not to linger too long or commit anything to memory. i want to save the surprises for when i'm ready to drink it all in, however many sittings it takes to read you from cover to cover. in the bottom right corner of a recto page, a monochrome image stops me in my tracks. you and your brother stand on a beach in lambton shores. this is the sand i was buried alive in twenty years after you drove off the edge of the world, decades before i knew your name. would it surprise you to know our bare feet have kneaded the same mashed minerals? or have you always been where the water licks the shore, waiting for me to find you? 230816 what's it to you? who go blather from