January 15
Your wife calls to say you are dead. Long dead. A month or so. Your heart, she said. It gave out. What did it give out? I wonder.


February 14
I keep watch by the upstairs window. Late this afternoon you will pull into my driveway. I know it. You always show up in February.


February 15
I had such fun yesterday preparing for your visit. I baked chicken with green olives and white wine. My hands were swift, like finches. I made a lattice pie—apple—from your mother's old recipe. Remember how you told my mother, as you sat in our kitchen one day after school, watching her make a cake, that your grandmother sifted her flour five times. My mother mentioned that (with a smile) not long before she died. Is it so horrible to pretend you're alive?


March 6
It's your birthday. Does dying mean you stop getting older? If you don't add a year today, then we are both 75. What if I live to be 85 or 90? You'll be young. I miss sending you a card. No, what I really miss is selecting the card. Finding the one that gets my message across without getting my message across.


March 10
It was past midnight when my father woke me from a sound sleep and pulled me into the living room. As he yelled, he stomped one foot, and each time, I heard the click of pine needles falling from the Christmas tree. I'm sure he was drinking. He said he'd seen us, back in September—September, mind you—our arms wrapped around each other like snakes. Yes, he actually said snakes. I was 15. He said I was never to see you again, not until I was 18, at least.


March 11
After that, we couldn't get enough of each other. The sneaking (my mother and your sister willing accomplices). Your lips on my breasts. Your tongue. The fogged windows. The wrenching apart. All of it still alive and beating inside me. Where are you?


March 21
This morning, I met with my Breakfast Group. We've been meeting for so many years that two of the group have died, and now we are five, three of us widows. As I left, I thought of all the Wednesday mornings I've walked down my friend's front walk—past the huge bush that yields red knockout roses, past the Miss Kim lilac that will be a haze of lavender blooms next month. Today, the bushes looked dead. But your kind of dead. If you were a rose bush, in a few weeks, you would flare to life.


April 4
So many scenes I want to rewrite. The night you visited my college on your way back to school in Virginia. You'd booked a motel. Of course you wanted me to sleep with you. Finally. After all those years of holding back. But I was paralyzed with fear. To be seen going into a motel. Not to sign in at the sorority house by 11. I could've been kicked out of school. Remember, this was Before The Pill. What if I'd gotten pregnant? My limbs were lead. We lay on the bed, and for the first time ever I couldn't respond to you. I was back by curfew. For days I felt sick.

A year later, I was married.

Two years later, you wrote my mother that you had found my red tennis racquet under your front seat.


May 6
Love can go underground for decades. Then one night your sister called. Out of the blue. Years of stashed feelings erupted.

I still have the notes I took from our conversation. My hands shook so that my handwriting looked like a child's. Your sister said your mother was in the hospital—a hematoma on her arm, and one near her ear. I asked about you. I'd stepped out the back door with the phone. It was a night like tonight. Cool with spring pocking the air. My gardenias were in bloom. Whenever I smell gardenias now, my heart is a wild horse.


May 8
I'm glad we found our way back to each other without harm to our spouses. If we had not, I would always see you as you were—unlined, unscathed, unburdened. I've grown to love the strange complications and composites of you. 


July 10
I never told you that I once saw you on a ferry I rode out of Nantucket. It was so you that I whispered to a friend that she must come see. "That's exactly how he looks," I said. One day, perhaps, I will see you again. Meanwhile, remember the little silver mouse mounted on a round piece of wood? You gave it to me in ninth grade. It sits on my bedside table, and sometimes we whisper to each other deep into the night.

Dannye Romine Powell is a poet and a journalist. Her most recent collection is NOBODY CALLS ME DARLING ANYMORE.

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