Skip to Content It was hard for us, the way you died every day, slowly and then all at once, just as such things are said to happen. Spring came, so soon it almost seemed you could’ve waited, but I know, I know, you couldn’t wait. My head was full of names of flowers, and I kept picking stones out of the earth as if making room for you—organic matter, ions and atoms, the clock of your body still ticking somewhere, but backwards. I have given up, you’d said. If I sometimes felt it could be all right that things went this way, it was because I knew the end was not the meaning of your life; it was something else instead— a series of small explosions, brief flame, color and light, the breeze lifting the hair from your cheek. It was those moments when you took your picture in the mirror and the camera widened and narrowed its one eye sleepily, like a cat loving you. All those close-ups of flowers.…