In Absentia, A Letter

by Michelle Koufopoulos '10

Tuesday January 22, 2008

The evening my sister and I
were born my father cried over
more daughters than he wanted
while the doctors worried.
My mother just tried to breathe.
An hour apart,
I was last. Her tailbone
broke with me.

My father left when I was eight,
for a woman with no sons but the money
to keep on trying and a love for red
vermouth and plastic purses.
They married four years later,
in 2019, in Helsinki
where none of us could afford to go
and my sister burned his ties on the
kitchen stove
as I sat on the counter and wondered
what my mother would say about the bits
of ember the smell of charred silk
and the wedding invitation,
gold and gaudy, strewn across the floor.

At fifteen Kella seduced the boy
who lived downstairs,
sneaking his car keys
out of his crumpled pants pocket,
while he slept sprawled across the bed
we were too old to share.
I drove and she planned, until
we reached the corner of Jennings
and Bedlam
where we ran out of gas and dumped
the car.
He should have pressed charges
but he fell in love with her instead,
like they all did, eventually.

I married on Crete; to a man I did
not like,
but wanted to love. My mother gave
me away,
ashen-faced and ill, reminding Kella
to take photographs, fix my train,
greet the scattered guests.

My son was born three years later,
on Easter Sunday of 2049. We named
him Jason,
after my father, and I nursed him
in front of the television, watching
England burn –
the university I had studied at, the parks
I had walked in,
the libraries I had loved—and feared
for the world.

A continent away, Kella slipped and fell,
running
for the last rush-hour heliojet, her heel
catching
against a crack in the platform. A man
reached out for her,
flailing, her sleeve slipping through his
fingers as she jerked away
from each possibility once offered up for
the taking:
a visiting professorship, the four lovers
who had proposed in succession,
the two children she could have had, if it
weren’t for
money and timing and travel
and her life, which had always come first.

I took the phone call in silence, and
waited
just a few hours longer to break my
mother, again.