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I always found myself short of words even when in the same room with you. I remember the way the table used to feel cool on my temples as I lay with little tan arms folded under my head and watched you move in the kitchen. Your movements were effortless and the way your feet swept across the floor as you talked was mesmerizing.

I could have lost myself to your movements for hours and the way your voice left your lips was like a continental flight defying gravity as words loaded with more meaning and weight then could possibly take flight, flew across an ocean of distance and landed in me forever shifted by your words trajectory.

My Auntie wasn’t much of a talker, and neither was I. My slim adolescent body would follow hers and I admired the way she could captivate a room with so few words. She was beautiful there is no question, she was breathtaking and it took few words to understand she was the stuff the universe must have been made of, the expansive incomprehensible possibility that sends scientists into generations of equations, but she was beyond the numerical.

I was 13 when she left. I stood with sweaty palms overlooking the balcony as the chairs filled in the church. They played songs and people cried and laughed, suits and ties shook hands with grieving pale faces and skirts and blouses mingled with pursed lips and soft damp eyes, and I stood watching. I was an awkward kid, long muggy hair and baggy pants, I was a young butch in the making and growing fast into a defiant body that stood against her in all her evangelic glory, but she was still a queen to me.

I watched the way grief falls from eyes and the way apologies are passed in looks. I watched the healing of a family who’s politics and ego’s were always at odds, set baggage at the doors and step into the room unified with pain and a longing to lift her slender frame back to waking life for just a few more hugs. I stood imagining what it would be like to breathe her back to life and crawl into bed one last time to listen to her laugh while I drew pictures, or explain the way ice cream is made, I would have given anything to breathe life back into her body and wish away the medicine bottles and the aches that left her immobile and fractured.

If I could stand in the room with her one last time, I would breathe just so she knows she never left. We wouldn’t have to say anything, her breath is mine, and living is speaking beyond the trappings of phonetics and grammar. Auntie if I could see you one more time, I’d crawl in bed and laugh just so you could hear I was still breathing and you could leave in peace.

I love you, and I’m still breathing.