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When I open your letter, there is your body. The new fabric of you is worn like a laurel around old flesh. Your letter, the human torso of it, docile as a woman asleep in a movie. I notice it breathe. Some-thousand miles away, your glasses mysteriously fog. The letter of your body is no longer sheen as in my memory, cursive swathed over a perfectly bare page. Words scratch over and replace other words; your brain spread out, briefly thinned, the red translucence of skin pressed to light. I imagine your brain on the dining table, compartmentalized for the seder plate: bitterness, mortar, tears, plague, mourning. I finish your letter, fold it up, and close it in the passenger compartment of my Honda Civic. A reliable car, I will have your letter for many years. I breathe out, or do you, and the window sheens opaque. I welcome back the brackish water between us; the undefeated champion of sorrow, scratched over by fleeting joy.
Sarah Rose Cohn Bennett is a writer and budding psychotherapist from Syracuse, New York. She currently lives in Lower Silesia, Poland, and teaches English at the Angelus Silesius University of Applied Sciences. Her previous work has appeared in Pithead Chapel (Twitter: @SRB926 / IG: @sarrose_ )
