There is a shipwreck between your ribs and it took eighteen years
for me to understand how to understand your kind of drowning.

There are people who cannot be held quietly. There are screams
that are never externalized. If I looked at the photo albums of your
past twenty years, all I would find are decibel meter graphs of
phone calls and the intensity of your silence as you sat
smoking cigarettes in the garage.

There is a shipwreck between your ribs. You are a box with
fragile written on it, and so many people have not handled you
with care.

And for the first time, I understand that I will never know
how to apologize for being
one of them.