[Header Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash]

The bed still had a depression in it from his body.

1Q84, Haruki Murakami

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we didn’t know
and we weren’t exactly waiting

but he died
right there in front of us

my mother beside him
muted by the consequences of a stroke

this first time
you had met my parents

how did we walk away from that
wake up the next day and just go about it

and then in a few months
i slept through my mother dying

the first time i read 1Q84 my father was alive
the second time he had been dead 10 years

and yet here we are together
living in this never-ending wake of

that time we sat around waiting for my father to die

—P.L. Thomas