Hour Six – Write a letter to yourself from the perspective of someone who is no longer in your life. It could be a former teacher you admired but you lost touch with, someone you knew from childhood, someone who passed on, etc. The specifics are very much up to you.

 

The Stuff of her Life

 

After a year passed by, of your passing on

(Both of you passing on)

I steeled myself to open her steel almirah.

Expecting dusty sarees and musty smells,

expecting my heart to squeeze

the grief out of my eyes.

Oh, but I had to smile.

She was a hoarder, that one, your wife.

The things she had clung to, the stuff of her life.

There were letters you had written her

all through the almost-sixty years of marriage.

I have put them away, for your grand daughter

to find in my closet, after I am gone.

(Poor thing, what will she do with them, I pause to think.)

I found letters you had written to the 18-year-old me.

(How did Ma have them? again I pause to think.)

You wrote incredibly boring letters,

a dashing dude, dad, you could’ve done better.

I read a few, they all had the same last line.

“Don’t forget to drink Horlicks, hope all is fine?”

Well, what do you know father?

I have decided to obey you, almost forty years later.

I now drink Horlicks daily; it helps me sleep.

Thanks for the advice, I will not weep.