And now for Aoife’s WRITE HERE, WRITE NOW entry ...

Beochaoineadh
A eulogy for someone who is gone, but still alive.

-For people lost to Snapchats and Silence.
-Written to be read aloud.

And someday, if you have time, turn off your phone and write me a letter.
Tell me where it all went wrong for us.
Tell me when the flowers began to rot and the sky fell down,
when gold crescendos rusted and fragrant nights turned sour.

Explain to me how your words get lost in translation
from your head to the page,
why you’re still searching for redemption
in a secular age.
Tell me why I wrote a note on your arm
but you just wrote me off.
Ask me if the rain still makes me smile.
And I will reply and I will apologise
for the way my moods flicker on and off
like that old light in your porch.

I will lie and I will tell you
I don’t have Virginia Woolf’s suicide note on my wall anymore,
I will let the tears fall on the page but never smudge the ink.
I’ll ask you if your hair still smells like lemongrass and summer,
I will write on black paper with gold ink.
I’ll ask if you ever found your passion,
if it ever materialised out of nowhere some dusty-cold day in mid-October.

I’ll tell you that it doesn’t drizzle here – when it rains it pours,
and I pore over those showers to see if they come from you.
I’ll wonder if I’m even a footnote in your biography but cross that line out.
I’ll dot my i’s and close my eyes and stop myself from asking
whether every word you speak still sounds like it means Amen.

I’ll sign off on the back of some sheet music I’ve started using
as kindling because every song takes too long to learn how to play.
I’ll tell you I’ve stopped trying to be a protagonist
and settled for being okay,
but I still get clean just to relapse
because I’m in love with the way it makes me feel.

Just-

Turn off your phone and write me a letter sometime.
Put it in an envelope, address it to me;
I’ll be somewhere between the ocean and our past.
Your conviction is the only stamp it needs.
Seal it with years of silence, with broken promises,
with lies that tasted so sweet we didn’t mind swallowing them.

And I will always wonder whether
I was second-hand smoke to you,
if you only felt things after I wrote them down,
if rain is the most poetic weather
but my words just made you sick.
And I will always wonder if you know
that I would have rearranged the sky for you.
That I wrote down the sheet music
for the rhythm of your heartbeat
so I could never forget it.

Sometimes I play it on my snare drum
but then I’m ensnared in an endless cycle of memories,
as present yet untouchable as smoke or mist or sadness or you.
That the skin from your shoulder to your ear
made everything worthwhile it for me.
That you painted my entire world magenta
and when you left it was all tinged purple

and I couldn’t unsee it.
But- I won’t tell you any of that.
Just turn off your phone
like you turned off your feelings and

Write me a letter sometime.


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