You're small. You're so small. I should have protected you. I hold you in my hands, these last pieces of you, but you're gone. There's no love, no Light, left for me to hold. Only these last pieces.

My Ghost. My heart. You are my heart. You were my heart that I allowed to escape the embrace of my body so that it might know the world.

There is nothing left of my heart. The Light is gone. The breath from my body is gone–the body that you pulled together from smears of skin and blood and a clot of tangled hair.

I thought I would break apart and return to those pieces, just as you have become these pieces, but I have not. I go on. I have one last life left, with no Light, no Ghost to guide me.

I take these pieces and place them beneath a tree. I arrange the fronds of your shell around you like a funeral wreath. I let you rest in the gentle and undying earth that the Traveler came to long ago, far away.

I must go on without you. That's what you gave to me. A heart to beat, hands to hold, and feet that will let me walk away from these pieces of you.