What remains

I brought you gifts by the score
Handmade and embellished with love
And I wrote you letters
Sent by the mail
Though you lived just two doors down

And when the accident happened
You couldn't look me in the eyes
You kept your headphones in
And turned the music up higher
And started to speak to me only
In your native tongue
Of which, though I'd tried to learn it,
Going to classes and pouring over books in the public library,
I could only understand
One word in five

I remember the day
You brought your new heavy green coat
Armoured against the knives of the gangs thereabouts
Because you never let me walk you home no more
And I remember the day you bought new bright pink lipstick
And sloppily painted your nails in white
That was the day, not before in the hospital,
That I couldn't recognise you no more.

And I packed my toys up in boxes
Headed to my studies
At a far off university
Leaving you behind
Though I still wrote you letters
They piled up sealed and unsent
In the drawer of the desk at which I studied
Long days and longer nights

I remember coming back for your wedding
To a neighbourhood boy we'd been to school with
But who for the life of me I couldn't recall
I may have got drunk but went silent
And didn't cause a scene at all

And your first kid was born and the second
I got my doctorate, an internship, papers to work abroad
And in fifteen years
You had a third, a fourth
While I caught a venereal disease and lay sweating
In a poor-house in a country
Way south of the equator
Where I wrote you a letter
Telling all of the truth,
Stamped and addressed it and came
As close to sending it
As to hobbling up to the postbox
And wavering with it half in the slot, half out

And I remember the last moment
On the bridge over the train tracks
And realising I hadn't loved you for years

And I remember thinking
Of those four children growing
Handsome, educated, strong.