Little Weirds(35)

I died and I died in a town by the sea. I died and you had already died in the bedroom upstairs, and when you died, the spark of your life flew into me when I watched your breath stop, and the spark did its last energy frizz inside of me and I didn’t tell anyone but half of the lights of myself went off as well. Almost every door in me closed too. Most of the space, where you used to tread, to rest, to read, to sleep, most of that space closed up for good. I became a house with only the porch light on.

Did you know that when you left me I kept the house of myself dark, that I could not be brave enough to put on a light in case I caught a glimpse of myself, and that I left the windows open and had chills and night animals came in and screeched at me and I didn’t call out for help because you weren’t there? Did you know that when you left my life and I was still there alive, I saw everything through a screen of your atoms?

I died and I died in the bed that you died in too, honey. I was clean and the last thing I ate was some chicken broth (two sips) and one performative bite of a toast with strawberry jam on it (for our son, so that he could be less scared), even though it burned the inside of my little old mouth. The color of the red burned it, the jam color? Or the sugar burned it? I died and everything about me was a pale blue, which is nice because the colors of your death were tones of cream and white and so we looked great together.

I died looking out at the grave you had someone make for us. Years before, when we were in our thirties, you’d said that you wanted to have lots of young friends when we were elderly so that we could really be a part of life and know what was happening, and you said that you wanted our grave to be a life-sized bronze sculpture of a tree. I loved you so much when you said it. And before I died and before you died you said a whole parade of other beauties like those little hopes that you described.

We had crab apple trees on our grass around our house, by the drop-off cliff that went straight down to a small beach and then the Atlantic. One night in a booth in a local bar we were holding our old hands under the table and we were looking across to the faces of our young friends that you had wished for. We laughed because we were not dark-minded people but we told them, “This is odd but it really is serious.” We told them, “We feel shy to say it.” We told them, “We are clearly old and it’s a cumbersome topic but we’d like you to make us some grave art.”

And our young friends were still for a moment but then one said, “Well, you obviously have something in mind, right?” And then you switched to the tone I’d heard you take in our meetings or your lectures at a university. I realized that after a lifetime of meetings about making our art that we were having a meeting about our final art. I paid close attention to the smoothness of your voice and the way you laughed to let there be air and a break in the tension of making your proposal but you never wavered from what you wanted. I bathed in the pleasure of one last time of you creating something beautiful for us to be in together. I felt proud as you told them the concept for our eternal tree, our final bed.

The young woman friend looked at me watching you and she did cry. She did. And she hoped for what I had, and what we’d had, what we’d never lost, because that was not part of our story. I died remembering the end of that night, that we’d had pints of beer, just a bit too much, that our friends had driven us home along our old beach road, that they’d noticed our birch trees and rhododendrons and dogwoods, and that the car had been quiet, with open windows. That our young friends loved us, that we scared them a little, that we felt young inside ourselves after making such a wild request, and that we’d looked to each other in that back seat and could have died then from such radical happiness. We whispered, “Should we just collide and burst into atomic dust here in the back seat?”

We looked old but it was only a sort of drapery that life asked us to hold. We obliged but underneath we were still Orange Soda and Seinfeld TV Show and Ping-Pong. I whispered with my frail old smile, “Smash into me, asshole,” and you said right back, “You wish.”

I died after I lived my life with you, because that was the story, that was the story that happened and it was the only one and so it is what I knew when I died. Closed loop.

I died and I have to move on soon, but I will always be so glad for the life I had with you. The fact is that it is incredibly hard to RIP and I’m just not sure I can get it done. Because what will I be now? I know that we will have new life with new forms and that we won’t be able to love each other like we did the last time. Maybe I am going to be a banana and you will be a car. It just won’t work. I know that. And I’m not one to beg for the impossible, especially as a banana, but I can’t seem to stop reacting to the enormity of the final end of us, sweetheart. A death. A bunch of them.

I died. I died and what was left of you was already there with our bronze tree, an extension of you waiting for me at the airport with flowers. We’d put your remains under its big trunk, in a bronze cast of a small egg. I died and they put my ashes in another egg. My ashes were buried in the earth in a lovely object next to your ashes in a lovely object, and we were treasures at the end of our lives, at the root of our art.





Dog Paw

You are not quite awake yet, but the dreaming is done and so is most of your sleeping. You are waiting inside of yourself, waiting to wake up. You are still behind the curtain that separates awake and activity from sleeping and dreaming. You sense that you are waiting to wake up, but you also know that you are asleep. It feels tensionless, like watching a flag wave, like coming closer to a shore after a pleasure sail. You have a feeling like being happy for someone who has achieved an honor.