Poems for the Anniversary of a Death

The first month you count the days. The second month you count the weeks. By the sixth month you stop counting and that's when it really begins. Grief moves in like a tenant who doesn't sign a lease. It leaves its things everywhere— a song on the radio, a brand of coffee, the way someone laughs from across the room and for half a second you turn. You always turn. People say: it gets easier. This is both true and a lie. The weight doesn't change. You just get stronger. Your arms adjust. Your spine learns a new way of standing. I still set the table wrong. Two forks, two plates, then I catch myself and the catching is its own small grief— the daily reminder that my body hasn't received the memo my mind signed months ago. The hardest part is not the missing. The hardest part is the ordinary Tuesday when you realize you went an entire afternoon without thinking of them and the guilt hits like weather— sudden, total, from a direction you weren't watching. But here's what no one tells you: that afternoon is not betrayal. It's survival. It's your heart finally letting you put the weight down for a minute. Not because you've forgotten. Because you're learning that love doesn't require constant proof of its own pain to still be love.

The tree is the same tree— same ornaments, same star, same lights that blink like they don't know someone is missing. Your stocking is still there. No one has the courage to take it down. No one has the courage to fill it. The songs are cruel this year— all that joy, all that togetherness, all those lyrics about home and here I am at home and the home is a house and the house has a hole where you used to be. I set your place at the table. Force of habit, my hands said. I love you, my heart said. I can't stop, my grief said. The children still believe in magic. I envy them— not the magic but the believing. Somewhere, I hope you're having Christmas too— whatever Christmas looks like where you are. I left the porch light on. I always will. It's not for Santa. It's the only way I know to say: you're still expected here. You're still wanted. Merry Christmas. I miss you. Come home.

In every childhood photograph, you are leaning into my half. We fought over the window, the blanket, the line nobody was allowed to cross. Now the whole back seat is empty, and I would surrender every border to hear you complain once more. Sibling grief returns me to the smallest arguments, where love was already hiding.