I can see you clearly now you’re leaving — a child of the garden again, and yes, everything is better outside, and as you say, it always was this way; it always was.
I drink tea while you paint the long legs of the table, turning them red to green. You will not rush this thing, this tiny table you picked up from the tip.
Just look at the state of you, I say, and we laugh, and you turn to me, and pull the hem of your red Christmas t-shirt outwards, while your brush drips green paint onto the grass.
Just look at you, for Christ’s sake.
You bend forward, the brush sliding from your fingers, and I say, how can we be sisters?
And that is it.
You roll onto your back, your skinny legs tipping the air, your bones honking through. But you lie there, tickled, legs zig-zagging this way and that.
All I can do is hunch forward in my chair, my cuffs still linked, my top button fortressed.
Yes, you say, how can we be sisters, waving your paintbrush crisscross the sky, Cambridge green flying and flicking.
Your legs, I say, your table legs still have red feet. Come on, get your shit together and finish this one thing, the only thing you’ll ever finish.
And before it’s done being said I breathe the chirrups of fairywrens in the bushes, and I’m opening my cuffs, pushing them away, and I’m thinking about us leaping over the roses in Nan’s garden, and how shattering those roses, petal by petal, was okay when we pretended we were doves.
I walk over to you, offer you my hand, and before its said, about being like doves in the garden again, I say something else, about you leaving the table to me in your will, and we jangle to standing, laughing and crying in the grass, your tiny table waiting, your falling hairs painted into it, set there.
The only part of you I will have when memories have all but gone.