Here are the things you aren't allowed to have:

our trips to Colorado, Columbo, grape juice, scones. The shadows from our bare-bulb

basement light. You can have my music collection every other weekend, but never Frank.

Also, please return Lilly's training wheels, my college Chemistry partner,

the first girl I kissed, along with Sarah Cork's summer home

and Ye Olde Ice Cream Shoppe on the boardwalk. Don't forget to send back

that time I cried right before our wedding because my brother wasn't there.

I stake my claim on Lilly and Kerrie's nightmares and the nights

they crawled into our bed shaking so that I could feel it in my bones. I wanted to build walls

around them, grow vines on the stones and lock them up in towers like Rapunzels.

As for the reproachful glances, the half-cast looks from the women at the supermarket 

and your faithful friends, keep them. Keep the lies you told and keep the guilt 

coating your lungs when you take a breath to lay the blame on me.

One day, Elizabeth, I will open my mouth and tell our daughters

the things I kept for myself—Sunday morning breakfast and pancakes

shaped like hearts and the smell of their hair after rain,

that time we drove into the mountains and carved our names into the rock.

And I will tell them I lost you driving back into town, when the chill was leaving

your bones and you realized your chest was hollow, ringing with a half-truth

you kept to yourself, like bowling, the Hollinses, weekends at the cabin.

Lastly, I would also like the t-shirt I was awarded after finishing the 10K race,

every address book in the house, the spare keys, and if you find it (I believe

it's somewhere in your office), the keychain I bought in Kailua from the hapa haole girl 

you found so stunning that you stopped dead still, a breath caught in your throat,

your lips stuck on a lie they could not shape.