Almost Her

Aisle three. Grocery store.

A person standing in front of me.

Short dark hair, the nape of their neck

touching the collar of a blue shirt.

I stopped moving.

The slope of their shoulders,

the way they stood—just like her.

Just like my sister when she's thinking

about what to buy, when she's in

that specific kind of freeze

where the choice matters too much.

My hand went to my phone.

I was going to text her: where are you?

But I knew where she was.

She was at her apartment, 500 miles away,

where she hasn't spoken to me

in fourteen months.

The person turned around.

Wrong face. Wrong everything.

Just the hair, just the neck,

just the specific way of standing

that belongs to someone I used to know.

I left my cart in aisle three.

I didn't buy anything.

I just drove home and sat

in my car in the parking lot

trying to remember when I'd stopped

being her sister and became

the person she doesn't call.

The nape of a neck.

That's all it takes.

One familiar slope of shoulder,

one person who isn't her,

and suddenly I'm back in

the place where I failed her,

the place where the phone calls stopped,

where I didn't call back

and didn't call back

until too many months had passed

to undo it.

I still think about that person

in aisle three.

I wonder if they felt me stop.

I wonder if they knew

that for three seconds,

I was standing behind someone else,

someone I'd lost,

someone who looked just like

the back of my sister's neck.