How often could things be remedied by a word. How often is it left unspoken.

You went away today, and now the inside of my skull looks like a letter to you. It spills out into the world between thought and reality, on the margins of books, on paper napkins and the skin stretched tight over the back of my hand. Colin reads my fingers and gives me a sad stare, but shakes his head, takes another drag on his unlit cigarette and steps outside into the February rain. His mouth makes a thin hard line that cuts too starkly through the paleness of his face, the hollows of sleepless nights living in his cheeks and below his eyes, and I should get up from the pew and follow him but the silent weight of vaulted ceilings presses down on me and I can't move. I gaze up at the stained-glass saints with their lead-lined haloes, turning over the ring in my pocket and in my mind crafting a lead-lined halo for you.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

The truth of things is that you went away years ago. You've been lost to me for so long that I was beginning to get used to the idea, and then you had to go and lose yourself for good. It was OK then, because the world was holding its breath and we could still pretend that miracles happened and you'd come back to us, but now you're gone and the cogs have started to grind again, time shifting beneath our feet and pulling us further apart.

There's a photograph of you on my mantelpiece at home. It laughs at me every time I see it. At least we won't see you get old, Colin had said to me on that morning, when he looked as though he had aged ten years overnight. You'll never look as old as we look now, and perhaps that's a small comfort, your eyes and hair and smile frozen where time can't touch them. That photograph laughs at grey streaks and wrinkles and skips over them because they aren't there. We don't think about you where you are now because it shatters the illusion.

Except at night when the words skitter through my brain, wormfood, wooden box, ashes to ashes, bones... cover my ears and think about something else.

Sometimes I pretend that I could have whispered one thing to you and it would have all been put to rights. So much was said, even then, but what was left unsaid was louder by far, and now the words have fallen through the gaps in the floorboards and gathered dust, perhaps too much to ever blow away.

I love miss love miss you.