Nothing left to say

Except: at night I dream about my pasts and presents converging. I am in some strange and parallel house were the two sides are separated. The house itself is split, down the middle, glass windows that slide up an down in each room gazing into the other. It is late at night and the house is filling slowly with the bodies of all sorts of people. My partner and I are trying to sleep, but on the other side is my brother laughing and waving me over. He is joined by my former friends and the two of them, despite knowing my name don’t say a word, just mingle with the others like tongueless ghosts of some forgotten age.

Except: in America you can suffer a mortal wound on a Wednesday afternoon and be expected back to work after lunch.

Except: I’ve learned to love the small quiet moments when I am all alone in my house and it’s the middle of the day and the warm sun is streaming in through my windows capturing everything in its delicate glow. A crystal sphere refracts the sun, dotting the walls with tiny overlapping circles of red and yellow and blue and green while my dog rests in my lap, snoring. I am trying to capture that sensation; that life can be a peaceful ticking of overlapping sensations, each softer than the last.

Except: they will ask you how you deal with it? Where you place your grief? Do you plant it deep into the soil of your soul or do you chunk it away, letting it decay and decompose in some great pile of tragedy and trauma? What happens when you remember the past is a foreign country you can never return to? Where do you feel the fading nostalgia of your homeland in your body? Is it there: right above the lungs: a sharp stabbing pain on inhale and then a jagged release?

Some days you will want to tell them that you will carry it with you, wear it like a thick and sturdy sweater against winter chill. You will want to explain how your love ebbs and flows, bobbing along the with the waves of the world. You will want to explain it without metaphor, but how could? Could you describe the necessity of your needs without abstracting it? “I want you here,” you’ll say. “I want you to hold me. I want you to be here, your body pressed against my own, guarding me against the world.”