hardened tender_square it’s the second time we’re celebrating your birthday without you. i can’t bring myself to erase your phone number from my cell because i want to believe you’re still reachable. i almost wrote you an email today, to tell you what you’ve meant to me and how much i miss you; to detail all the changes that have taken place since you’ve gone (as if you’d hadn’t seen them); to ask for your forgiveness with what’s happening between me and your son. there was this childish belief that i’d hear back from you if i'd written. i mean, how incredible would that be? a cloud-based email service where you could talk to your loved one on the other side and receive a message back—not with their voice, but you could read it and know the words strung together matched their unique speech pattern, and you could hear their cadence and inflection as they spoke it from your memory. tonight, we ate ice cream in your honour, the crystalized sugar melting on our tongues, and we were sweet to each other. i didn’t want my wish for you to dissolve that same way, leaving the aftertaste of grief on my tongue the way it lingers on my breath when i wake beside him each morning. 220304 what's it to you? who go blather from