I hope your girlfriend reads this

On his birthday, after he is in bed, I lift a glass to you and I toast that you don’t show up this year to break his joy or that if you do, this hard life you chose has changed you. But I don’t hold my breath because I would be gasping, I would be blue.

The air is cold and you are cold, all but dead to us. But you are alive, five miles down the road, though we never hear your voice or see your face anymore. Except every time that child comes down the stairs there you are, as honest and beautiful and perfect as you will ever be again.

And we try to tell ourselves that the loss is yours, that the football games and the first day of high school, the homecoming dances and the sweet sixteen are only ours to keep, that we get them all and never have to share. But the loss is his, when you do not call, when he speaks of you and his voice is an impossible question, when he wonders about the fences and the heartbreaks that will never be mended.

And so, the loss is mine, because I have no answers. I stand on the front porch in the near dark, with the streetlights screaming and demand restitution from the meager trees, the autumn sky for my rage, for his pain, for your weakness.

When you wake on his birthday do you think of that morning? When the November sun trembled through the fifth-floor hospital window? His round face nestled in white blankets. My heart, your dark hair reinvented in one small body, the alchemy of our hard-fought love in your arms, near my bed. When I said, we should name him something strong. This last baby, this child that was only starting his life, on that day that was the beginning of the end of our marriage, of you.

I named him after an angel, the one who brings good news. The one who tells Mary she will have a son.

You are five miles away, but you are vapor now, you are almost invisible, a man I invented when I, too, was just a child.

A birthday comes and goes, and the November leaves are on the wind. I ask God, the universe, the ghosts of you and me for a little news, but there is nothing good.

Except for the boy with the hopeful heart and dark hair who kisses my head, who says, it’s okay mom, we don’t need him.

And I wait until he blows the candles out and the wishes are made. I wait until he sleeps to drag my body into the night, into the yard. And I fight my rage with the dead branches that have fallen there. But then I go inside and I sleep fine, because we are not the broken ones.

Because we have all the love, all the haloed moon evenings, all the birthdays.

And you have only a tomb of old memories. Just that morning sixteen years ago, fading cold and low into almost nothing, like the pale November sun.

Next year we won’t even speak your name.