My then boyfriend
Now husband
Never forgave you for putting your hand on my thigh,
Casually mentioning the ******* beaches in the south of France.
Your daughter needed a chaperone on your family’s upcoming vacation.

You went and I stayed of course
The ******* beach all the poorer for my absence.

I am not the kind of girl who
Finds herself at Disney Paris at the end of the movie.
That’s not the way this movie ends, anyhow.

12 years later
One lung lighter
Tens of millions denser
and poised to send your daughter
to Dartmouth
Or Tulane
Or anywhere she’d rather.

She’ll have everything the world could offer her
In exchange for her father.

A parent shouldn’t have to know.

So I forgave you the hand thing
And the lewdness of a drunken survivor
Poised on the lip of an ever-widening hole.

If you asked to take me now,
I think I’d go.
I’ve always wanted to see the Louvre.
I can almost hear it:
The clicking heels and murmurs,
Your overwrought humanities professor explanations of this or that and me humoring you with appropriate reverence as always,
And the dead certain silence of the thing we will not speak about,
Pointedly conspicuous in its absence,
Filling the space between.

I'm a raw, exposed
crab, molting
a
new skin.

When cancer takes a life, we blame cancer

Depression is a disease.

Don't blame the victim for losing the fight.

In November of 2011, Dad was told that he was terminal and wouldn't survive.
He was diagnosed with Leukemia and he passed away at the age of sixty-five.
Dad worked hard for many years to feed his family and keep a roof over our heads.
He lost his battle after 20 months of Chemo and would have no more years ahead.
When he was diagnosed with his horrible illness, Mom called me at once.
A nurse told Dad that she'd never seen a Leukemia patient survive longer than 18 months.
Dad survived for 20 months, that was two months longer than what the nurse said.
Mom died in March of 2013 and just four more months later, Dad was also dead.
Dad suddenly took a turn for the worse and sadly, he couldn't live anymore.
Today would've been Dad's birthday and he would've turned seventy-four.