The days you weren't sick were called holidays.
We packed your things, and moved to the living room.
Play scrabble on the love seats, and jut our jaws out to the long lettered words,
Put them back in place, only a little more droopy
when they sounded sad.

On the days you weren't sick,
We had celebratory radio talk shows talking holy through the cracks in our house.
When they told us about war, we turned the station.
Stayed silent in our own bomb shelter,
Stayed unaware, yet somehow experienced.

On the days your bones mimicked the floorboards in the ways they bent and chipped and creaked,
we packed your things and moved to the bedroom,
the one your mother slept in as a child,
the one our linens grew over to forget the trace of hers.
Your knuckles, neatly overlapping the curvature between your fingers,
Your eyes closed and breath inhaled.
I would count your heartbeats the same way I would count the declining degrees of your temperature:
Each one to be acknowledged, each one to be thanked, each one more than the one before.

The day you got really sick, we did nothing and you sat by the window singing church songs.
Mostly just whistles of oxygen escaping your lungs to let me know you were still there.
You existed only in that spot for a week until we packed your things
And moved to the hospital floor
for people like you.

On the day the nurse brought me flowers and apology letters,
I played scrabble in the living room,
Kept the radio on loud.
I remembered the ways you ached
And how long you had to stay that way
before we got comfortable with the long words and the war stories and finally compared them to our own.