I Never Wrote Back

She wrote "you can do this" at the bottom of the page —

red ink, the letters tilting south a little,

like she'd run out of formal and was working through the middle

of a stack of thirty papers at some late, tired stage.

I got a B. I thought it meant I'd missed something structural.

I didn't understand the note — the scrawl, the rushed-but-meaning-it —

didn't know what it would cost me not to sit

with it, to write back, to do the simple ritual.

She died last week. I saw it in a group

I never check, a name I recognized,

and then the small strange wreck of being surprised

that I was sad, and then the loop

of closing an app and opening it again.

The essay was on something I can't place.

The note I still have somewhere, in a drawer, displaced —

red ink, slanting, running out of space,

thirty more papers left to go.