A Million Junes

Other houses have support beams and foundations. Ours has bones and a heartbeat.

But some people are too alive to fully die, their stories too big to disappear

But some people are too alive to fully die, their stories too big to disappear,

I was just a blip, a spark, the blink of God’s eyes. Because of you, it was more than enough. It was everything.

I was just a moment, and you gave me a million Junes.

I was just a moment, and you made me
forever.

I’m happy, so happy to be a tiny fleck of a thing alongside you. We may just be moments, June, but to love a handful of people very well, that’s a good life

I am very small, and I don’t find myself wishing I were any bigger.

All I want, with my one tiny moment, is to love you.

If you remember anything about me, remember the truest thing: I will love you after all the stars have burned out, after the sun has died and ice has covered the earth, after the last human has taken her last breath.

When I was a kid, I dreamed about exploring pyramids and riding on elephants’ backs. I wanted to sail across the world and climb Mount Everest and look down over everything. I thought that was the life I’d lead and that the moments of mine that were closest to that would be the ones that made me.

I follow it, chase him—wherever he went.

He’s dead, I think, his trillions of cells sprinkled in Lake Michigan, and that little girl back there hasn’t existed in ten years. But still I’m running down the steps, searching for him, dodging the pile of shoes at the bottom, though it’s unnecessary because, somehow, all those shoes have vanished.

I don’t understand.

Why is this happening?

Why did I see him, and why is he gone again so soon?

I spin uselessly, tear through the dark kitchen. Dining room. Living room. The sunroom off the side of the house, its windows overlooking the hill and woods and stars. I find nothing. No one.

I barrel back up to my bedroom.

The lamp’s off. The window’s shut, the Whites gone. I’m alone.

But he was here.

At least I think he was

“I love that story,” the little girl says.

I love that story.

“Someday I’m gonna write it down,” Dad murmurs. “I’m gonna write down all my stories for you, June-bug, so you can know just where you came from.” He rustles her hair and kisses her head again, and then my tears blur the scene.

You didn’t write them down, I want to say. They’re already lost, shadows flitting across my memory. You’re lost.

And yet there he is, just out of reach. Real and impossible.

It was spring when he finally reached the tiny town of Five Fingers, between the Five Fingers offshoot of Torch Lake and Lake Michigan. The water was a beautiful turquoise—so clear you could see your hand through it—and the rocks and cliffs were all red and gold, like a sunset. The forests were thick and thriving, full of pure sunlight and cool shadows and tiny, fluttering things. The women were strong as sequoias but lovely as the northern lights, which you could see on
a clear night, a great blanket of green and purple and blue spread across the sky.