another year of missing phil...

...and trying to integrate his memory into days that, in most ways, require forward momentum—knowing the difference between looking back and staying back.

I know now, two years later, that this is nothing like "moving on": it's just moving. Trying (despite an unbelievably cyclical interior monologue) to think new thoughts, experience new things, make each day as alive as possible. Learning how to navigate these long, elliptical paths around the sun.




But missing, still. And speaking of orbiting the sun, he would've been 30 today.

(...I dial again
the number I know by heart,
thankful in a diminished world
for the accidental mercy of machines,
then listen and hang up.)