Your wet hair was in my hands, I could swear it.

When I was 9, I tracked mud through the door,
handed my grandma a postcard that came in the mail. 

She took a seat at the dinning table.
Who is it? 
No one. An old friend. Her face slowly turned into a face I hadn't seen before.

The year was February 1951, a time you had to put socks on straight out of bed
as to not catch a cold from stepping on floors.
Grandma? She was gathering bunches of table cloth in her hardened hands, wringing them around,  Grandma?

She turned her head, looked at me as if trying to remember,
Did you brush your teeth? - Go wash up.

I left her there, walking slowly and stopping short of the bathroom, 
the hardwood floor creaked, giving away my position. 
And put on that teal shirt instead, she yelled.  

I could hear her crying when I turned on the facet, I put my ear up to the door.

Later, I plucked the postcard from her underwear drawer. It read:

I can't remember how we met - we met wide on the mouth,
We met on the couch - those splinters too close to the house -
We were the house - I got up early today, ran the facet, and
your wet hair was in my hands, I could swear it.
 - Hortense


The older I got, the more austere and detailed this man became. He sunbathed in the nude. He cut himself shaving as a teenager and still branded a scar on his left ear. He loved early in the morning. He had a library the size of my apartment. And in that library, bookmarked between two pages, The Nature of Birds, was a photograph of my grandmother, young. Looking hungry at something beyond the frame. The list went on. I believed the list. The list became a person.