Little Weirds(33)



Look at me. Yes, I am a woman who woke up and got dressed and sat down here. But look again, look from the seat inside of myself that I let you sit in for just a few moments: I am a woman in dessert tones at the start of a bleating little day. Mouth full of clover. Oh, holy shit, I am a big fat fruit on a tree, dangling in the air just so, living in a state of fullness and exhilaration. I am connected to eternity and I am part of everything and although I am with all of it, I am still different from anything and everything.

I am an example of a specific way of spending time and feeling existence in this world.





I Died: Bronze Tree

I know that I can’t change it: I died.

I died as a very old woman.

I died after living more of my life with you than I lived with just myself.

I did die, and everyone wants to talk about that because it is the final thing, it is the only real completeness I guess, but completeness was never a prize, in my eyes. Connection always was, deepening, tending, asking, cycling through, all of the things that we did together before we died our deaths.

I died but it was so small compared to how I had lived so much and for so long with you, alive. One death was so small compared to all the things that we did in our life, things that we did all the way through, right to our ends.

I died seven years after you did—you went before, because that is the statistic that I know. I died knowing that that was the statistic, but still unsteady, wobbling on the unbelievable truth that you had left me. And you’d gone just when I was really about to become someone that needed a hand on me, not just to go down a stair but also to be on my soft old skin, to calm the hum of my bones that vibrated too roughly for such an elderly frame, because you know me, I just had so much energy that it was both a power and a liability.

I died but my blood was still fresh and fast, my heart was an up-close light, but my mind had wandered away by the time I died. My mind was lightly stepping in concentric circles, farther and farther into the navy blue air-sea behind me, where I moved in my own rhythms, whirling my long-ago past with my house’s hallways now, mixing up rooms, putting odd things in my purse, insisting that someone dead had called on the telephone, insisting that there were “bugs with long feet and long tails” that came at sundown or that you who were already dead needed me to do something for you like mail a postcard to a teacher. I frightened people because I was in fact touching the frayed space between dimensions, talking to you from my side, which is not allowed. I would travel long distances in my mind, and it would make my face go blank. That was the compromise for living in the inner world, that my face in the outer world sort of paused.

I died and I was a spirit-rebel at the end, sneaking through the curtains in the worlds of spirits. You would have been proud. You always hated authority. You were always parking in front of the hydrant and then being royally PO’d when you’d have a ticket on the car or no car at all anymore. You always thought that breaking the rule was not just an act of defiance but of instruction, saying, “This rule is not life-affirming and so I will show you that it is just fine to live life without the rule.”

But it never worked.

I died and before that, in the last dimly lit years, when I could have sworn that the house would fill with a thick sea-fog, when I saw a blue whale float by my doorway as I lay in bed, it was odd because you were not there but I was having an experience with you, about you.

There was no other time in my life when I looked for you and thought you were there, thought you must be upstairs or about to walk through the door, but you really just weren’t there anymore. There was no other time when I’d shopped for groceries and bought grape jelly, which only you like, and brought it home just to realize the horror of what I’d done, buying purple jelly for a person who is not there.

I died and my sneaking and confused speaking and many demands after my journeys in my mind were not a surprise to our son and he never cut me off or called me crazy. He made me write it down. He took pictures of me. And he was glad to have them.

I died and our son sat in the living room of our house by himself and thought of a woman that he was not bold enough to love as you had loved me and I had loved you, and sitting there in a T-shirt and looking so much like you, he resolved to go out there and try to get her, to celebrate us by having his own love.

I died and I’d loved having a son with you. I had loved making both of you the same sandwich, I had loved saying to you through hidden laughs, “Go in there and tell him that he really needs to practice that cello, not just noodle around on it,” and you’d pawed at me and I’d loved it and then you said, “You go in,” and then I’d really lost my patience with both of you, which I also secretly liked, being cross about a cello, and by the time our son was bathed that night and you’d read to him and I’d listened to the story from our own room across the hall, I couldn’t wait for you to come lie next to me in our soft clean bed.

I didn’t let you read your book that night. We never had air-conditioning. I would get up and check on the fan in our son’s room. I would get up just to smell you and give you kisses on your back in the shape of what I could remember of Orion. I could remember mostly just the belt, which is dear but not very impressive. Over and over again on your back every night, the belt. One, two, three cosmic smooches from me to you until you died and then I died, but sometimes in the time before I died and after you died I kissed three stars into the air of where your body used to be in the bed, thinking thoughts like, “If I can’t have him then I will bring the sky down into the bed, one kiss at a time, and then it will be like I am in the cosmos with him.” It was a fun activity that helped me fall asleep.

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