Apology
I can't explain how strange it is to see your face, to hear your voice. You died nine years ago, maybe ten now. How then do I feel this flood of emotion when you laugh, when you swear off the cuff in videos I was never meant to see? How can I explain the way your quirky tongue turning a phrase in a flat, two-dimensional mirage fills me with inexplicable desire to reach into the screen, grab ahold of your locks of hair, pretend that you really are alive and that all of these breaths you're taking are real; that all of the syllables you form with your precious, perfect lips are not simply voyeuristic fantasies of your afterlife -- or mine?

I'm forming my thoughts carefully, dreaming that I might get one more chance to talk to you, to tell you everything you (could have?) meant to me, but it's a fantasy I'll never realize. It's just enough to make my heart sink every time I pick up the pen and try to write about the intimacy we never shared, shouldn't have shared, needed to share; how I try to tell you the future I saw apart from you in your eyes; how I try to ask for your forgiveness for being nothing by trying to be everything to you. As I watched the photons dancing before my eyes, all I could think was how foolish I was to ever believe that this terrible pen could produce the eulogy to do justice to your memory.