The List

I picked up the scrap of shopping-list paper from the kitchen counter, the one with the faded blue lines, and there it was — her handwriting, still the same after twenty wild years, looping and sure as the first time she wrote “I love you” on a napkin in that Mexican restaurant in Smith Street in 1992 or whenever the hell it was.

DIY for home.

• • fix shelf in pantry
  • whitewash the atrium walls
  • fix side gate lock
  • clean the gutters
  • sand the kitchen counter

little jobs to patch the house before the For Sale sign goes up, before the bank and the recession swallow the dream we built on coffee and Miles Davis and nights screaming love at each other in the rain.

a hundred letters in a box in my cupboard, long-distance love from when we were young and apart, paper still soaked in her perfume, still killing me. twenty-five years and the writing never changed. still beautiful, still her.

I stood there in the half-lit kitchen, the note trembling in my hand like a leaf, and felt the whole marriage folding up like an old road map — the recession howling outside, forcing the sale, forcing the end, sending me off alone down some road I never picked, carrying her ghost in ink and perfume and broken locks.

her hand on the list,
the same hand from the napkin,
fix everything but us.