Creatures

by Crissy Van Meter

He said the fog brought death. Or the death brought the fog. Or it was just neither, or both.

When she went away, I learned this pressure, the weight inside my chest. There was the pressure of missing things, the leaving of things, the invisible weight that felt so thick, even when everything was still moving. She taught me the constant foreboding of implosion.

You are just a daughter who wants to love him. But your life is all those lessons of his in nature: of calm and rough seas, of so many cryptic sea monsters, of things that live inside the Pacific. Some days, the metaphors are too messy and washed-out, and you’ll just want to be loved back.

don’t know what it’s like to keep things.

We were the kind of people who had to be quiet to move on with things. Talking it all out would have fractured us forever.