The Only Poem I’ll Ever Write

For a few seconds after I entered her apartment, it was like I'd stepped backward through time.

As though it were just yesterday that Leigh and I were flopped out on that couch, watching corny sci-fi movies while binging on dill pickle chips and planning our next summer trip.

For just an instant, the good memories of this place eclipsed the last eight months of horror, hospitals, and heartbreak.

Then my eyes fell upon the rows of stacked moving boxes and I was once again clobbered with the reality that my big sister was dead.

Dead, at 26, from a cancer so aggressive and rare it seemed ridiculous. My knees trembled as a fresh wave of grief washed over me. I leaned against the front door, willing my legs not to give out.

“Hannie is that you?” my mother’s voice called before she appeared in the living room before me. “Are you okay, honey?”

“Yes,” I replied, willing myself to stay upright. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Are you sure?” Mom asked. “We don’t have to do this today, we still have until next week before the new tenants take possession.”

I glanced up at my mother, whose kind but harrowed face looked as though she’d aged ten years in the last six months. I knew her calm composure was a mask for my sake, which made me all the more determined to conceal my own anguish.

She had enough problems without worrying about me too.

“No, I’m fine. Just tell me where to start,” I replied.

Mom nodded. “Okay then. I already got started in the bedroom if you’d like to do the kitchen.”

I nodded, but just as I was about to follow my mom through the apartment, I caught sight of the bookcase.

“Wait, what happened to her books?”

I pointed to the empty shelves that had housed her science fiction collection, including a rare first edition copy of George Orwell’s 1984 that had been our late grandfather’s.

Mom sighed and shrugged. “Abel was here earlier and said he wanted them.”

I opened my mouth to ask why my brother would take Leigh’s books and leave before we had finished packing up the rest of the apartment, but mom had already disappeared into Leigh’s room.

I already knew the answer anyway.

He wanted that first edition of 1984, of course. Leigh had mentioned to us at a family dinner last year that she had it appraised, and it was worth over $8000. Clearly, Abel had just come to procure the one thing in this place with any monetary value and then promptly vanished.

I was angry, but not surprised.

I snatched one of the cardboard sleeves that was leaning against the wall and began to aggressively fold it into a box, channeling my frustration towards the task at hand.

Abel was never really there for us before, so why would he be now.

Then again, I shouldn't talk, I thought. I wasn't even at Leigh’s bedside before she passed. I wanted to be there, but she had begged me not to miss my midterm exams. I listened, naively thinking she still had days or even weeks left.

She didn’t.

That was my sister, always looking out for me, even when she was on her deathbed. A lump took hold in my throat, and I swallowed hard to field the impending tears.

Just focus on packing, I told myself.

I got to work on my sister’s cabinets, carefully rolling up each glass in newspaper before packing them in boxes.

I’d been at this blessedly mind-numbing activity for about twenty minutes before I caught sight of Mom out of the corner of my eye. She was standing in the kitchen doorway with something in her hands.

“Leigh wanted you to have this,” she said.

She was holding a shoebox.

“What is it?”

Mom opened the shoebox and placed it on the kitchen counter. Inside were a bunch of flash drives and a small black notebook. “She said you would want the box with all your vacation pictures and videos. Looks like she uploaded everything to flash drives.”

I nodded, my tight throat returning at the thought of looking through happy pictures of us together with the knowledge that I could never again create new memories with my sister.

To try and distract myself from this reality, I picked up the notebook and traced my finger over the small silver rocket embossed on the cover.

“What about this?” I asked. “I’ve never seen it before.”

Mom shrugged. “I know it's strange but Leigh was very specific about it. She said, ‘make sure Hannie gets the black notebook with the rocket on it.’ I don’t know why because there doesn’t seem to be much written in it.”

I smiled weakly. “She probably thought I could use it to write poems.”

My mother patted my arm and retreated back to Leigh’s bedroom to finish packing, leaving me alone with my unexpected inheritance.

I unhooked the notebook’s elastic closure and started leafing through the blank lined pages. It was a little disappointing. I had hoped for some last words to parse through and reflect on.

Leigh had always shown an interest in poetry and enjoyed listening to me read my own poems. Yet, she never wrote any herself, even though I’d constantly badgered her to try.

It looked as though Leigh had finally broken down and bought her own notebook, but never ended up writing anything in it.

I just don’t have a mind for it like you do, Leigh had always said. You know me, I’m better with the analytical stuff.

And she had been. She was practically a genius. In fact, she’d been promoted to a cushy data analyst position at her company just months before her terminal diagnosis. But the grunt work it took for her to get there - along with the burden of renting in the city’s most expensive neighborhood - hadn't left her with a whole lot to show for her brilliance.

All she owned was that rare book, which Abel had already claimed for himself.

I shook my head, silently chastising myself for even thinking about money at a time like this.

I would have never sold the book anyway, even if it was mine to sell. Leigh had loved it too much and it was a family heirloom.

Not that I couldn’t have used the money. My last semester of university was coming up and I had no clue how I was going to pay the tuition.

I was about to close the notebook when I reached the last page and caught a glimpse of Leigh’s distinctive scrawl.

I inhaled sharply.

On the very last page of the notebook, Leigh had written a short poem:

The Only Poem I’ll Ever Write

Rocket Coffee Caper

Bright Orange Glitter

Bland Doorknob Paint

Fragrant Window Snow

Glad Wooden Cube

Fourteen Found Fairies

“What the heck, Leigh?” I whispered with a confused smirk.

Leigh and I once joked that the less sense a poem made, the deeper its meaning must be. It seemed that she had purposely written this terrible, nonsensical poem as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to assuage my pestering her to write.

Was this just Leigh’s way of sharing one last little inside joke with me?

I closed the notebook and placed it back in the shoebox, deciding to figure it out later once I finished helping Mom empty my sister’s apartment.

*****

After I made the long drive back to my dorm room, I tucked the box and notebook into the back of my closet and couldn’t bear to look at it again for weeks.

Then on one particularly trying day, I got laid off from my part-time job as a waitress and received my tuition bill in the mail that same afternoon.

I barely had enough saved to pay for next month’s groceries.

I thought about calling Mom for help, but loathed the idea; she had enough financial burdens of her own.

I just needed to see a friendly face.

My sister’s face.

I dug through my closet and recovered the shoebox. Flinging the notebook aside onto my bed, I started rummaging through the box of flash drives looking for one that might have videos from the summer we backpacked through Europe.

Then I spotted a flash drive that didn’t look like the others. It had a small screen on it and buttons along one side.

Curiosity getting the better of me, I plugged the mysterious flash drive into my desktop.

A text box popped up on the screen, asking me to install a program to run the flash drive’s application.

I clicked the download button. The application opened, revealing itself to be a virtual Bitcoin Wallet.

I gasped.

Leigh had revealed her fascination with Bitcoin to me years ago, claiming that it was the currency of the future.

Bitcoin prices are going to take off like a rocket in the next few years, just you wait and see, she had proclaimed.

Looks like Leigh had put her money where her mouth was.

And she was right. Bitcoin was certainly making a splash these days, with a single Bitcoin now worth tens of thousands of dollars.

But before my excitement could bubble to the surface, the screen on the drive lit up and the application requested a password.

I examined the drive and found I could enter up to five numbers by pushing the buttons on the side.

But of course, I had no clue what those five numbers could be.

I collapsed back in my chair, feeling defeated. Fate was cruel, I thought.

Sister lost. Job gone. Bitcoin Wallet - that may or may not be able to solve my money problems - just out of reach. It was right in front of me, but it might as well be on the other side of the galaxy.

The rocket.

I snatched the black notebook from my bed, once again tracing my finger over the silver rocket on the cover. I thought of my sister’s voice.

Bitcoin prices were going to take off like a rocket.

Leigh had wanted me to have this box of flash drives, which means she wanted me to have the Bitcoin Wallet.

And she had wanted me to have this specific notebook.

I flipped through the pages again, looking for anything I may have missed. But I could find nothing except for that terrible non-poem in the back.

I stopped at the poem and stared at the first word:

Rocket.

But that couldn’t be the password because it needed to be numerical and have fewer digits.

“Leigh, you are killing me here,” I said aloud with a sigh. “What am I missing?”

I stared back at the computer screen. I couldn’t enter the password from here, but the application did have a small hyperlink:

Forgot password? Click here to recover your account.

I clicked on it. A new text box came up:

Enter your 18-word recovery phrase to regain access to your account.

I glanced back down at the poem. Not including the title, the poem was 18 words exactly. I carefully typed in each word, held my breath, and tapped the enter button.

Just like that, I was in.

I literally almost fell off my chair. There was only a fraction of a Bitcoin in the wallet, but it was worth $20,000.

It would be enough to cover my tuition and other expenses until I graduated.

A sob escaped that I didn’t know I’d been holding in. For so long my tears had been fueled by loss, but for the first time in months I felt something else rising up through the grief:

Gratitude.

My big sister was still looking out for me.