Little Weirds(34)

Sometimes, when my brain really started to ferment in its own syrup, when the inside of my mind would sprout powerful nightshades and blooms from a vital dementia, I would be sitting in a room full of people at a party, people talking about movies and new purchases and people having various relationships, and my face would arrange itself as if I were listening but really I was staring into a long black cone that would form in front of me when I was sitting still. I tried often to move around and do busywork but I was old and I was tired and I ended up sitting down a lot and then that’s when the cone would come. The cone was a slowly turning tornado made out of something smooth and dark, and instead of coming down from the sky to lift up a car or just eat up a town, it stretched perpendicular to the horizon, with its base where the ocean turned into a line, and its very tip flicked out like a tongue and spun and spun and spun. The dark conical vacuum circled my face and sucked and sucked and whispered, “Let it out, let me take your sorrow to the darkest distance, let me take it off your hands,” and it didn’t seem friendly but I never knew how hard it would be to live with the loss of you, and I wanted to let go of the pain even though it was the last thing that felt alive from you, and so I, surrounded by people just doing their party-talk, let the cone take pain from me. “Tell me,” it coaxed.

I spoke in my mind but also into the cone, “I miss being a wife. I miss saying my husband. I am tired of being in a constant state of recovery. I don’t know how to be alone. I feel weak and fragile and crazy and deeply ugly. I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what to do.”

And the cone had its fill and finally collapsed into a long flat triangle and flew away like one wing of something, like a sail with no ship. I couldn’t tell if the cone was a friend or an enemy and my guess is that it was neither but it did cause great trepidation in me, like when people have tigers as pets and they love them so much and then the tiger just randomly kills their partner and they are heartbroken but not really angry at the tiger, but also they must kill the tiger?

It’s confusing. I was often confused. The cone left. The party was still there. Someone had dipped a cracker into something. They put the cracker on a small square napkin and put the napkin in the palm of my small old hand and said, “Try this.” I looked bewildered. Someone said, “You like this, Mom. You’ve had it before.” I thought, “I have never had this before. This is the only time this has ever happened to me. The rest of the time I was with my husband and I was myself.” That’s sort of how things started to go before I died.

I died and our son sat in the living room that I had kept nicely until the last devastating moments that were devastating and also frightening, not because of illness but because I lost the will to be tidy and admitted to being tired in a way that was different than the fatigue I dramatically complained about for my entire life. Before, when I would complain of being tired it was always a subliminal plea to be treated nicely, to be loved, to have you all know how hard I’ve worked for you and that I wanted to be admired and thanked. My mother did that. You always hated that I did it. I admitted to starting to die when I stopped caring for my rooms, stopped doing that thing where I brought branches and leaves and flowers in to make the house alive. It was a statement that something was over. I made it to our son silently, through stopping my patterns. I made it to you in my voice inside of me, telling you, “See you soon, I think.”

I died and our dog was still alive, and we’d had at least four dogs. I died and the dog was beside himself and he slept right next to me and would not leave the room and followed them out when they took me away. I died and right before I died I remembered having a snack with you in our creaky old bedroom late in the evening on our wedding night. I remembered feeling shy as the photographer took our picture in the fields beside the party earlier that night. We got married in our own fields. Near our own old house. I remember being afraid of getting a tick. I died and while I was leaving it all and my eyes couldn’t even open I still remembered wearing a white bra the next morning as a new bride while I stood behind you at the sink, brushing my teeth as your new young wife. I died and I was old.

I died after living with you and never not living with you once I started. I died and behind me there were vacations with you, and before each vacation there was a conversation between us in which I begged you to take a vacation, was bitter toward you for seemingly wanting to work by yourself in a room more than you wanted to take a vacation to the ocean with me. But then we would go and you would always love it and you would always love me and when I died this was the story I knew. There was never another story when I died. There was never a time when we went away from each other and kept living somewhere else. I died and there were times when I had been furious at you, when I had leveled sheets of insults at you, prodded at your identity, been bored, felt abandoned, been mad about your unwashed socks and your problems with authority but I lived through it all and I dug deep, I didn’t give up, and because I held on, I lived through countless pleasures and beauties with you and your brilliant mind, and we did as much as we could and then you died and then soon after that, I died too.

I died and I never had to know what it was like to live without you except for that very last part, which was heart-killing but natural. I died and I never knew what it was like to not be invited to your birthday party, to have to give you a present a week before or after the actual birthday. I died and I had always given you the present right on time. I’d woken up with you in the new morning of every new year of life that you tried out and carried out. I died having only lost you at the very end, not before.