There are a lot of ways to write about love bringing someone back from the dead.
A kiss.
A spell.
A desperate bargain.
Some ancient force deciding that, actually, death made a mistake.
I didn’t want any of those.
Because An Hour Dead was never really supposed to be a resurrection story.
The woman comes back, yes.
But that isn’t the part I care about most.
The part I care about is what happened while everyone else thought she was gone.
An Hour Dead
I’d been dead only an hour.
Long enough
for the candles to burn low.
Long enough
for the wax
to harden against the table
like pale bones.
Long enough
for someone to close my eyes
and fold my hands
over my chest
as though I had finally
learned how to be still.
Then you knocked.
Three times.
No one answered.
So you came in anyway.
You found me
dressed for burial,
black lace
buttoned to my throat,
flowers wilting
around my head.
You didn’t scream.
Didn’t fall
to your knees.
Didn’t beg death
to reconsider.
You simply
pulled up a chair
and sat beside me.
“You’re late,”
I would have said
if dead women
were allowed
to complain.
You took my hand.
Cold.
Stiff.
Useless.
And rubbed your thumb
across my knuckles
the way you always did
when you thought
I was somewhere
too far inside myself.
Nothing happened.
Of course.
This isn’t that kind
of story.
Love does not command
the dead to rise.
A kiss
doesn’t restart a heart.
And there are no gods
waiting behind the curtains
to reward devotion.
There was only you.
And me.
And a room
already beginning
to smell like lilies.
You hated lilies.
Said they smelled
like funerals.
I suppose
you finally proved
your point.
One by one,
you pulled them
from around me.
Dropped them
onto the floor.
Then you started
unbuttoning the lace
at my throat.
“You always hated
things touching your neck.”
One button.
Then another.
You loosened
my funeral dress
like I might wake up
complaining
that whoever buried me
should have known better.
You opened the curtains.
Moonlight spilled
across the floor.
You cracked the window.
Let the night in.
Then you sat back down.
And talked.
You told me
the kitchen faucet
was leaking again.
That you forgot
to buy milk.
That the neighbor’s dog
had dug beneath the fence
and shit in our yard.
I would have laughed
at that.
Maybe you knew.
You told me
you hadn’t washed
my coffee cup.
That my shoes
were still beside the door.
That my hair
was still wrapped
around the shower drain
and you couldn’t bring yourself
to pull it out.
You told me
there were pieces of me
everywhere
and you didn’t know
which ones
you were supposed
to throw away.
That’s when
my finger moved.
Barely.
You stopped talking.
Looked down.
Waited.
Nothing.
You laughed once.
A broken little sound.
“Losing my fucking mind.”
Then my finger
curled around yours.
You went still.
So did the whole room.
Even the candles
seemed to stop flickering.
My lungs opened
like windows
in an abandoned house.
Air tore through me.
Painful.
Violent.
Alive.
I gasped.
You fell backward
so hard
the chair hit the floor.
For a moment,
neither of us moved.
Then I coughed.
Once.
Twice.
And you—
you started laughing.
Not beautifully.
Not like people laugh
in love stories.
You laughed
with tears on your face
and one hand
over your mouth
like joy itself
had frightened you.
I sat up.
Slowly.
The flowers
fell from my hair.
You crawled toward me.
Not rushed.
Not certain.
Like I was something
wild
that might disappear
if touched too quickly.
Your hand hovered
beside my face.
“Can I?”
Even after death,
you asked.
I leaned
into your palm.
Warm.
So fucking warm.
And maybe that’s when
I understood
what brought me back.
It wasn’t your kiss.
You never gave me one.
It wasn’t destiny.
Or magic.
Or some ancient promise
that love conquers death.
Love doesn’t conquer death.
Death wins eventually.
It always does.
But you had walked
into a room
where everyone else
had already decided
I was gone,
and you still remembered
that I hated lilies.
That collars
made me uncomfortable.
That stupid stories
made me laugh.
That I liked
the window open
at night.
You remembered me
in all the small places
death had overlooked.
So when my heart
finally stumbled
back into rhythm,
I didn’t think
you saved me.
I thought—
there you are.
Because maybe
the darkest part of love
is knowing
one day
one of us
will be left
sitting beside
the other.
Holding a cold hand.
Talking about
the leaking faucet.
Trying to keep
an entire person alive
with nothing
but ordinary things.
And maybe
the most beautiful part
is knowing
until then,
when I reach
through the dark,
your hand
will still be there.
I think one of the strangest things we do when someone dies is immediately start changing everything around them.
We close their eyes.
Fold their hands.
Dress them in clothes someone else chose.
Surround them with flowers.
Lower our voices.
Suddenly this person who had preferences, habits, annoyances, favorite foods, inside jokes, and probably a very specific opinion about how you loaded the dishwasher becomes—
the body.
And that is where this poem started becoming something more than a creepy resurrection story for me.
Because everyone in that room has accepted that she is dead.
But the person who loves her walks in and still sees her.
Not something sacred.
Not something frightening.
Not some beautiful dead woman surrounded by lilies and candlelight.
Her.
And apparently—
she would be pissed about the lilies.
😂
That detail matters.
Actually, all of the stupid little details matter.
The collar around her neck.
The open window.
The leaking faucet.
The missing milk.
The dog shitting in the yard.
Her coffee cup.
The hair in the shower drain.
None of those things sound important.
Until somebody is gone.
Then suddenly the cup they forgot to wash feels impossible to touch.
The shoes beside the door stop being clutter.
A strand of hair becomes evidence.
You were here.
That’s what I wanted the ordinary things to do in this poem.
I didn’t want him sitting beside her body delivering some huge declaration of love.
He doesn’t need to tell her she was the love of his life.
We already know.
Because he knows she hated lilies.
Because he loosens the collar around her throat.
Because he opens the window.
Because when there is nothing left to talk about, he tells her the faucet is still leaking.
Sometimes I think we underestimate how much of love lives in remembering incredibly boring things about another person.
Not their birthday.
Not their favorite color.
The things nobody would put in an obituary.
The exact face they make when they’re annoyed.
Which side of the bed they sleep on.
What food they always leave behind.
What stupid story will make them laugh even when they’re mad at you.
How they take their drink.
What makes them uncomfortable.
What they complain about every single time and somehow never fix.
Those are the pieces death doesn’t know what to do with.
And I think that’s why this line became the center of the whole poem for me:
You remembered me in all the small places death had overlooked.
Death can take a heartbeat.
It can take a body.
It can turn a person into a photograph and a date carved into stone.
But it can’t retroactively erase the thousand tiny ways somebody existed inside another person’s life.
And I knew very early that I did not want a kiss to bring her back.
Because we’ve seen that story.
Love is pure enough.
The kiss happens.
The dead person gasps.
Death is defeated.
Everybody goes home.
Cute.
Not here.
😂
He never kisses her.
He doesn’t even try.
And when she wakes up, he still doesn’t immediately grab her.
Instead—
“Can I?”
That might quietly be one of my favorite moments in the entire poem.
She’s been dead for an hour.
She has just taken her first breath.
He has every imaginable reason to want to grab her and never let her go again.
And he still asks.
Even in a moment that terrifying and impossible, she is still a person whose body belongs to her.
Not a miracle he gets to claim.
Not something returned to him.
Her.
And I think that’s part of what makes his remembering so important.
He isn’t keeping an idea of her alive.
He remembers the actual woman.
The woman who hates things touching her neck.
The woman who likes the window open.
The woman who would laugh because the neighbor’s dog shit in their yard.
That is who reaches back.
And then there’s the line that makes this much less romantic than a resurrection poem probably should be:
Love doesn’t conquer death.
Death wins eventually.
It always does.
I wanted that there.
Because I don’t actually think this poem works if love defeats death.
That would make the ending too easy.
She came back this time.
But the poem doesn’t promise forever.
One day, one of those hands really will become cold.
One of them really will sit beside the other.
And there won’t necessarily be a finger curling back around theirs.
That’s the darker truth sitting underneath everything.
Loving someone means knowing there is a possibility that one day you will have to exist in a world where they don’t.
Or they will have to exist in one without you.
There is something horrifying about that.
And yet we do it anyway.
We learn everything about another person.
We build routines around them.
We leave our coffee cups next to theirs.
Their shoes become part of the scenery.
Their shampoo ends up in our shower.
Their stupid stories become our stupid stories.
We allow another human being to become so tangled into the ordinary parts of our lives that losing them would leave holes in places nobody else could even see.
And somehow—
we still call that love.
Maybe that’s why I don’t think the resurrection is actually the most beautiful part of this poem.
It’s this:
when I reach through the dark,
your hand will still be there.
Not because that hand can save her from everything.
It can’t.
Not because love promises that neither of them will ever die.
It doesn’t.
But because right now—
while they are both here—
someone knows exactly who is reaching.
And reaches back.
Until next time,
—Destiny
P.S. “There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
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