150 the widows’ handbook Apart Aline Soules I’ve given you away. I don’t know who got your lungs or eyes or bones, but your heart went to a young woman with two small children. She wrote to say that it will slowly give way to her body’s disease, but not before she sees her children grow. Are you breathing in the chest of a man just down the street? Do you look at a lake through the eyes of a boy who has only known the sound of its lapping waves or the chill of his first plunge of summer? Can you climb a mountain in the now-sturdy legs of a woman on the other side of the country? The more those legs take you away from me and your heart pumps in another, the more you breathe to a different rhythm and each of us sees people and places the other will never know, memories, ghosts, dreams 151 the more my empty heart wonders if we have met again, neither of us able to recognize that we are together still. ...