Leaving Soon

She will not go to her next-door neighbor’s funeral, even though he was young and died of too-soon-sickness. How could she say goodbye if she’d never really said hello? It would be like going to an acquaintance’s going-away party because the night was free and the music loud. Because listen: “I’ll miss you,” only sounds genuine if it’s replacing “Don’t go— you are someone I could’ve loved.” She didn’t know him well enough, doesn’t want to be like all those other girls in cheap black veils, extracting tragedies like bees on cracked soda cans. Besides. She has had enough sadnesses of her own. She couldn’t get the cancer to kill her, just to leave a violet mark. Eventually, every lover will ask where the scar came from. “Surgery." She tells them surgery, but only if their eyes are a watered-down green. “Bitten by a shark,” she says, if she expects them to leave as soon as the sheets untangle.