I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of sleet.

My sisters ferried me. Our parents met us there. Moved me into the second floor of a white frame house in a flat town where I knew no one.

Snow dusting the ground, crescent moon and Venus strung together like charms.

A quieter night I’d never heard. The first of the year, the first apartment that was only mine.

We hauled most of the boxes up the stairs. The ones in the very back of the truck went straight into my parents’ car.

They set me up, saw me off, as if I were eighteen instead of thirty-five.

Hugging goodbye, Dad advised: Carry on. Said these were his mother’s final words to him at the hospital.

After drinking too much, after a stroke, after cancer, my grandmother lived to be old.

My sister, who was about to get sober, played me a song called “Carry On.”

He never came back to gather his abandoned things.

Sitting in a circle, strangers would say was not capable of instead of didn’t want to, and I wanted to believe them.

Friends said Throw it to the curb, but I hated imagining books and records mixed with rotting fruit and cat litter.

And besides, for a long time I didn’t know the difference between his stuff and mine.

In the end, I had to decide.

I packed boxes, labeled them with his name, and loaded them into the very back of the truck.

They were the last to come out, never entering the first apartment that was only mine.

I asked my parents to drop them off at his place on their way home, three states away.

Here is something of his that is also yours that I have been carrying.

Into the quiet, I am bound / what you have lost, I’ve never found

Here is what I was given, here is what I was left with.

I don’t want to hold it anymore.