With tongue in cheek, you asked me if you could borrow a twenty, knowing that you would hand me fivefold more before the night ended.
With a mouth swallowing down the whiskey and ginger ale, your larger-than-life presence commands the room with every single word you speak.
With a boisterous laugh ending in “oh boy,” your arm slung around mom, and your gaze fixed on me with pride.
With a house full of people from all walks of life, a warm crowd with cold drinks who exist in different worlds, from mansions to shelters outside the doors of our own home.
With presents scattered below the tree, bulbs from past lives before kids, before adopting me, before cancer, before the tongue in cheek, the whiskey and ginger, the boisterous laugh, and the house full of people all faded away.
With an empty seat at a table in a house, you’ve never seen.
With a grandchild, you never met.
With a daughter who took on all of your best qualities in the face of no shared genetics.
With a soulmate yearning for, incomplete without, the mate her soul has lost.
Without you.