How to Build a Body for Someone Who's Gone

Begin by choosing a name.

Do not choose the one you called them when they were alive. That word is a door you are not ready to open.

Materials Required

• One memory of their voice, whole enough to echo.
• Three objects they touched every day without thinking.
• The last piece of clothing they left behind, unwashed.
• Every photograph you own where they are not looking at the camera.
• Silence large enough to lie down in.
• Your own body, still functioning, for now.

Lay these out on a cleared table.

If your hands shake, pretend you are merely sorting laundry.

Step 1: Assemble the Bones

1. Begin with the stories you tell about them when you are trying not to cry. Arrange them in chronological order, from the first time you met to the last time you refused to say goodbye.
2. Each story is a bone. The small ones: how they took their coffee, the song they never skipped, make good fingers and ribs. The larger ones: how they held you when the doctor called, how they walked into the sea and did not turn back, are better suited to spine, to femur.
3. Lay the bones out on the floor. There will be gaps. Do not fill them yet. You are not supposed to remember everything.
4. When you come to a night you cannot talk about, mark that space with an absence. This will eventually become the skull.

Warning:

• Do not borrow bones from someone else’s stories; they will not hold the weight.
• Do not skip the last argument you had. Bones built only from tenderness cannot stand.

Step 2: Fashion the Heart

1. Take the three objects they touched every day. A mug. A key. A phone with a cracked screen.
2. Close your fingers around each, one at a time, until the shape of their grip imprints itself into your palm. If pain arises, count it as proof of life.
3. Place these objects in the hollow of the ribcage you’ve laid out.
4. Add the unwashed clothing, pressing it down gently as if tucking them in for sleep.
5. Now, for the crucial part: choose a moment you wish you had done differently. The time you did not follow them outside. The call you didn’t return. The apology you rehearsed but never voiced. Fold that moment into itself until it cuts your fingers. Drop it into the chest.
6. Listen. If you did this correctly, something will begin to throb. Not a heartbeat, more like a pulse of regret, steady and low.

Notes:

• A heart built entirely from guilt will beat too fast and burn itself out.
• Balance it with memory of their laughter, or at least the way their shoulders shook when they almost let themselves be happy.

Step 3: Weave the Skin

1. Collect their photographs, but choose only the ones where they do not know they are being seen. The candid, crooked-mouthed, mid-sentence versions of them. Avoid the posed ones; those are masks, and you have enough of those already.
2. With scissors you do not care about, cut each photo into thin strips. Eyes into lashes, hands into fingers of light, a jawline into trembling edges.
3. Begin to weave. Over, under, over, under. Do this for hours, until the strips stop being images and become texture.
4. Drape this weave over the bones and heart. Smooth the seams at the shoulders, the knees, the throat. If there is not enough to cover the whole body, leave the sternum bare; some things should remain visible.
5. For the face, work slowly. You will be tempted to recreate them perfectly, but perfection is imagined. Leave one corner of the mouth unfinished. Let one eye blur at the edge. Let the nose be slightly wrong.

Reminder:

• You are not building them for the world.
• You are building them for yourself, and you have never once seen them clearly.

Step 4: Install the Voice

1. Find someplace quiet they spent a lot of time. This is usually the kitchen at midnight, or the driver’s seat of your car in an empty parking lot.
2. Say their name. Not the pet name, not the half-swallowed syllable you muttered into their shoulder, when something went terribly wrong, but especially if it went perfectly right. The full thing, the one that tasted like a promise when you first learned it.
3. Wait for the echo. It will not sound like them, not at first. It will sound like you, thinner. Speak again. Tell that empty space something you never told them. Something small. Like, how you hated the way they chewed, how you loved the way they left the lamp on. How you wondered if they thought of you, when you didn’t speak for 6 months.
4. Each confession is a wire. Imagine threading these confessions from your throat into the body on the floor, stitching your vocal cords to their imagined ones.
5. When you feel the tug – sharp, like swallowing broken glass, stop. The connection is complete.

Caution:

• Do not lie during this step.
• A voice built on lies will crack the first time you ask it a question.

Step 5: Calibrate the Weight

1. Stand beside the body. Measure your height against theirs, as you remember it. Adjust the bones if they loom too tall or shrink too small; grief distorts scale.
2. Now gather the silences.Think of every moment since they left when you opened your mouth and said nothing: at the grocery store, holding their favorite cereal; in bed, reaching for the warmth that wasn’t there; in a room full of people, laughing a second too late. At your high school graduation.
3. Let each silence settle onto the body like sand.Watch the chest rise with the heaviness of unsaid things. The body will gain weight, not mass, but gravity.
4. Press your hand against its sternum. If your palm sinks as if into water, you have given it enough. If it resists, if it feels like stone, you are still holding back.

Adjustment guide:

• Too light, and they will drift away the moment you blink.
• Too heavy, and they will never move at all.

Step 6: Program the Limits

It is important to remember that this body cannot leave the room you build it in.

1. Take a piece of chalk, or salt, or breath held long enough to hurt.
2. Draw a circle around the body, wide enough that you could sit within it too.
3. At each point of the compass: North, South, East, West, whisper a rule: You cannot ask why. You cannot go back. You cannot blame me. You cannot stay forever.
4. If your voice breaks, begin again. Rules spoken through tears blur at the edges and are easily broken.
5. Once finished, sit inside the circle. Your knees may touch their woven skin. This is acceptable. This is, in fact, the point.

FAQ:

• Can the body cross the line if I invite it? No. The line is not for them. It is for you.
• What happens if I erase the circle? You will spend years redrawing it in other ways.

Step 7: Initiate Movement

1. Place your hand in theirs. Note the temperature: somewhere between absence and memory.
2. Tell them about your day. Start with something ordinary. The broken kettle. The neighbor’s dog. The way your own name sounded when the barista mispronounced it.
3. Watch their chest. You may notice a shiver. This is not breathing. This is recognition.
4. Ask them a question you already know the answer to. “Do you remember the night we got lost?”
5. Listen to the silence that follows. Allow it to rearrange your organs.
6. If their fingers curl around yours, do not pull away. They are only using the muscles you have given them, stories and regret and woven skin, to form a mirror of what you wanted. What they were not.

Note:

• They will never initiate conversation.
• This body is not a person; it is a mirror that answers only in your reflection.

Step 8: Troubleshooting

Problem:

The body will not move at all.

Possible cause: you skipped the argument bone.

Solution: return to Step 1. Unearth the words you hurled in anger, the ones that lodged like shrapnel. Set them in place of a missing vertebra. Try again.

Problem:

The body will not stop moving.

Possible cause: you built the heart entirely from “What if?”

Solution: reach into the chest, yes, with your bare hands, and remove one imagined outcome at a time.

The version where you caught the train.

The version where they turned around.

The version where you did not hang up.

The version where they never let you down.

Lay them on the floor and step away.

Problem:

The body speaks in their voice, but says only what you most fear.

Possible cause: you lied during installation.

Solution: start over or learn to live with it. Some echoes cannot be reprogrammed.

Step 9: Maintenance

1. Visit the body regularly. Not every day; that would be worship. Not once a year; that would be denial. Find a rhythm that mirrors your heartbeat when you hear their name.
2. Dust the shoulders, straighten the fingers. Replace any memories that fade with fresher ones, even if they are invented. Memory does not care about accuracy, only repetition.
3. Resist the urge to introduce them to others. This body was not built to withstand other people’s perspectives. Someone will point out that the eyes are wrong, or that you have made them kinder than they were. The structure will shake.
4. When you leave the room, do not look back to see if they follow. They cannot, but hope is a trickster; it will paint footsteps where there are none.

Service life:

• Properly maintained, the body will last as long as you do.
• Neglected, it will crumble into ordinary objects and dust, and you will convince yourself it was never there.

Step 10: Decommissioning (Optional)

This step is rarely performed.

1. One day, you will stand in the doorway and notice that the outline of them no longer hurts in the same way. The ache will be duller, like weather in a distant city.
2. If you decide this is the day, step into the circle one last time. Sit where you first sat. Take their hand the way you did at the beginning, noting how little of it still feels like them.
3. Tell them the story you have never told, not even to yourself: the one in which you survive without them, not as a betrayal, but as a continuation.
4. As you speak, begin to gently unwind the woven skin.
5. Strip by strip, photo by photo, until their face becomes scattered fragments on the floor.
6. Remove the objects from the chest. The mug. The key. The phone.
7. Hold each until it is only what it is, no longer an altar.
8. Finally, take the bones, those stories you have been carrying like a skeleton in your arms, and decide which to keep. Some you will place back into yourself, feeling your spine straighten. Others you will bury in the garden, where they may grow into something else.
9. Erase the circle. Chalk with water. Salt with your heel. Breath with breath.

Warning:

• After decommissioning, you may feel lighter and call this forgetting.
• It is not forgetting. It is learning to carry them in a way that does not break you.

Notes for Future Builders

• No matter how precise your measurements, the body will never match what was lost.
• This is not a failure of craftsmanship. It is the nature of absence.

If you find yourself starting over, gathering bones and photographs and silences for someone else, do not despair.

It means, despite everything, that you have continued to love in a world where bodies do not stay.

That is a good thing.

Because you were created to love.