A few years ago, a writer friend I loved was sick with cancer and I was looking after him. When I took him to the hospice, he packed nothing but a hand-drawn card from Ofelia, and left this note addressed to his landlords, taped to the stove: "I am going to a nice place to die. When I am finished with that welcome task, a trusted colleague of mine will enter the premises to take care of my belongings and tidy up for you. Please do not mistake my literary papers and classical records for trash and put them out on the curb."
You stopped in before leaving. The night hadn't quite come in from the day, trailing a sinking orange light behind you. Everyone is looking for moments like these, small, frail, beautiful connections where the world stops for a second. The moments so happy or so sad they are magic. Both at once, sometimes, like now. I was dizzy, devastated, I actually ran to you, swept up from that long porch by emotion so pure and so intense it was more like a premonition. I was weightless for once in my life but you were low and heavy, and that is how I understood I would never see you again. There was no reason to think it, and I didn't think it in words. It was just something I could feel from underneath the earth, as if it had already gone and done it, as if it had already claimed you.
Lorette C. Luzajic is an artist and writer in Toronto, Canada. Her essays, stories, and poems have been widely published, in Los Angeles Cultural Weekly, Book Slut, Peacock Journal, Cargo Lit, Heart of Flesh, Adbusters, Rattle, Dog Fancy, and many more. She is the founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review, an online journal dedicated entirely to writing inspired by visual art. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.