you took her. How fucking dare you.

How dare you take the mother of your child from this earth. How dare you destroy her. How dare you, taking this incredible fucking woman from my life and the life of everyone who loves her.

Because that’s what’s left, isn’t it? The echoes of her, all the love and shine she brought to our lives, all the shadow in the words she couldn’t say behind us until we can’t help but turn around come Halloween?

Bloody murder screams in the Trader Joe’s spooky soundtrack haunt no one like they haunt C anymore, thanks to you.

It was spring sunlight through the courtroom windows when I stared you down, then breezed past to address the last-ditch drivel from your defense attorney’s mouth. But those memories still chill with a late October shudder and sigh for the holiday I was named for and lost.

Instead, I squint through the red dye and corn syrup to the heart that stopped beating in 2014. Because of you. Even now I write this letter to you instead of her, because there is so much I wish I’d done to stop you.

I rewrite the end in my head—I grab my keys and shove her in my car and blow out our credit cards on Big Sur motel rooms and bar tabs. I tell you off in some incantation that breaks through your wet brain and expels you, never to return.

Or I take you down in the parking lot, interrupting that stoic cigarette over which you plot your next treacherous move. I pin you and choke you long before the smoke does; even Philip Morris, in all his profits, could not compare to the righteous rage in my grip on your hindsight windpipe.

But the story stays the same. She leaves in a body bag while I watch over that last journey, alongside an opportunistic journalist and, after the fact, some slick agent of the landlord.

Then it’s you and me in that idyllic courtroom, the cul-de-sac where we shared smokes with her projected in the dust above us. That curb is the last place I remember her, head in hand behind a curtain of hair I wish forever I could part and kiss her on the cheek, or lips.

I tell the jury the half but not the whole of it, because despite my oath there is no speaking to the breadth of what I—what we—lost in those last moments she saw anyone but you. It was enough to seal your fate; your trial was docketed two weeks still, but you took the plea the next day. I know what I did.

Unlike her, you will return, in three short years if you cooperate with the state. And then I’ll inherit her shadow, wondering if my last and/or next slashed tire is your doing—until my liver or yours gives out (probably yours).

You took the tick of its time but you’ll never take the heart in which I nestled my head, agave backdrop to the heavy breast that she would declare mine long before even acknowledging your lowly ass.

You were so scared of the power we hold, you tried to sever it with a dull kitchen knife five times over or more—I don’t know, I just saw the blood. But you best know it was not spilt without a howl for your own corpse, from which we will sprout wildflowers.

Until you are forgotten on the pollen,

A