The Biographer

Be my biographer: simplify me into hardcover, keep me on your shelf with all the other storybooks, read me to your daughter when she asks you where we go when we die. Write every line as an affirmation of the love for which I once survived—every minute I lingered in your wake, every shortened breath I had to take to capture each small hour of those final days. Fill my pages with midnights and prose, with the ethereal moments we rocked on the porch swing with the breeze between our toes, with the petals of every rose that you’d ever made mine (press them to my spine; their scent will be gone, but their form will stand the test of time). Speak my name like a memoir. I long to live, if but a lifetime longer, on the lips of the one I loved.