Not my image.
Each year I learn her differently
though she has not changed.
I meet her in unexpected places,
over and again when I am not prepared.
Her laughter arrives softer now,
not the ringing peal of twenty-three,
but a quieter note,
teaching me how joy survives absence.
Where once I only saw her gone,
I begin to see her whole—
the child, the woman, the thread of her
woven through my days.
She is the strand I keep weaving,
bright against the darker cloth.
My hands know her pattern
even when my eyes do not.
Grief is not a still picture
but a loom forever moving.
I pull her through the shuttle,
and she becomes part of what I wear.
I wrap myself in her life.
This tapestry becomes
the shroud I will wear
on the day we meet again.
