Griefs of glass

fragments of a moment in grief.

There is a mathematics that keeps me afloat. Numbers I cling to. A logarithm that supports me in the flood of emotions. I have to pretend I am rational, even as I know none of this comes from that.

It has been ten days since I cried for the first time in ten years. I had been courting her for nine months, give or take, I noticed her on the winter solstice, and it’s fall equinox now.
We had been “together” as I saw it for 29 days. One day beyond a moon’s turn. Two days short of a month, and 33 days shorter then my next shortest relationship.

That’s worth being angry about, right? As if emotion is an equation. As if relation is multiplication. This explicative is multiplicative . . . .

---

The first song comes up as I start walking home.

I am thinking about how if I had held my boundaries as intended -  if I had held my intention and the tension hadn’t broken -  I would not be going through this now.

“I shouldn’t have kissed you,” I said after crying in her room this afternoon.
“Are you sure?” She asked, the faintest hint of a smile on her lips.
“No,” I said, “but it feels like it.”

It feels like that now and I am mourning my folly when I speak out loud.

“Ooops,” I say “-I did it again.”

Then Britney Spears is singing through me softly into the night. My voice suddenly cavalier against the pain.

“Oops I did it again,” I begin to sing
“I made you believe”

“We’re more than just friends.”

“Ooops you think I’m in love”
“I broke your heart”
“. . . I’m not that inn-ooo-ocent.”

The song  is on my phone and I pull the it up. Sit outside on a park bench and listen - over and over again. A neighborhood cat comes and winds its way around my ankles and then up onto my lap where all the emotion goes into scratching behind its ears. Everything directed at this one small cat.

---

As I turn the corner on the trail I see three girls and a boy, maybe sixteen, walking in the opposite direction.

“Hello!” says one girl cheerfully, aggressively, in the way of that age with friends,  as I pass.
“Hi,” I say back in a friendly way.
“How’s it going?” She presses.
I don’t say anything. We each go a few steps.
“Wow!” She comments to her friends “Don’t answer me, geez.”

There is momentum going in the opposite direction, so that I don’t stop her, and by the ten seconds later when I know what to say we are beyond going back.

“Hey,” I would say, “Never ask a stranger how they are doing. It’s a disrespectful question, because between strangers there is only one answer - ‘good’

“But I am not good. I am fragile, breaking, shattered like glass, and scattering everywhere, and so when I stay silent it is to protect that. Don’t ask when you don’t have the time to hear.

---

All of a Hawthorn tree is medicinal. Leaves, bark, roots, berries, flowers. When making medicine you can use any of these, but I was taught that it is best to use all. When spring came around, she was grieving a lost lover, and lamenting that she had given all her hawthorn away to a friend. I gave the last of my hawthorn to her, joking that I hoped I wouldn’t regret it, and having roots, bark, leaves, and thorns available to me, gathered some right away and stuck it in vodka to tincture.

Time passed, we became lovers, I added hawthorn flowers, and then the loving ceased.

Hawthorn is the primary herb for the heart. It clears the blood, prevents heart attacks, and strengthens the system overall - and herbalists know that this metaphor extends to a broken heart as well.

As it was described to me, hawthorn sets its thorns as protectors, allowing you to feel without risk of being hurt while open. Taking it feels like permission, like the warm arms of a mother wrapped around you, giving you leave to cry.

Ten days after her leaving, I’m on foot, walking towards my ride to a grief ritual that is to happen that afternoon. In preparation, wondering what to bring, I have packed my unfinished Hawthorn tincture in its mason jar.

I see a glint of red out of the corner of my eye, and turn towards it. Little red berries on a tall tree. Is that? No - it couldn’t be. I think for one brief moment that it’s hawthorn berries that overwintered, before realizing it’s fall, and these are in fact the first of the season. I stop, unsling my backpack, collect a handful of berries, and put them in my mason jar. Tincture done just in time.

---

The second song comes the next day. It’s Friday and a little girl named Friday is sitting next to me at lunch. I’m eating slowly - my stomach is tight, despite the distraction of the children I am supposed to be teaching, and I cannot tell if I am very hungry or not at all.

“Once upon a time I was falling in love, now I’m just falling apart.” sings the seven year old.
“There’s nothing I can do, a total eclipse of the heart!”

I pause, chopsticks suspended halfway to my mouth. She keeps going.

“Once upon a time there was light in my life but now there’s only love in the dark.
Nothing I can say, a total eclipse of the heart!”

I look at her, little asian girl, oblivious of who or what speaks through her. I imprint the song in my mind, enough pieces to look it up later, and listen to Bonnie Tyler in all her intricacies. This song slams aside my capacity to make light of my pain. This song compares my private grief to the movements of moons.

“. . . I really need you tonight. Forever’s gonna start tonight. . . “

Later I’m eating carrots and potatoes after the grief ritual, when one of the women I was paired with shows off her T-shirt. “Every now and then I fall apart” - worn specifically for the occasion. Another starts singing.

“Every now and then I get a little bit restless

And I dream of something wild.”

“Turn around” interjects another in perfect harmony. The rest of the group joins in, all of our voices mingling

“Every now and then I get a little bit helpless

And I'm lying like a child in your arms”

(Turn around)

“Every now and then I get a little bit angry

And I know I've got to get out and cry”

(Turn around)

“Every now and then I get a little bit terrified

But then I see the look in your eyes”

---

There’s this giant old madrona tree in the middle of the field, and whenever we walk by it the children immediately run to it - twenty or so small children running, jumping, and screaming through its sun strewn branches until we signal it’s time to move on.

I’m assistant teacher,  so my job is to round up the stragglers. I circle the tree and find one little girl has climbed quite high, just above my head, and is having a hard time getting down.

Normally I might consider this a teaching moment, but right now we need to catch up to the rest of the group.
“Do you want help?” I ask.
“Yeah,” replies the six year old.
“Grab my arms,” I say and reach up, and lift her by her waist down to the ground.

She is so small, and so light, that it is almost effortless. I have never felt so strong, and nothing has ever felt so right. As we hurry to catch up with the rest of the group, I’m filled with the overwhelming desire for my own.

---

There is a woman who I hate. Not for any good reason. She used to come to dance when I was young, and I took an automatic childish dislike to her.

She took a great like to me, and decided to try and dance with me. I turned away and pretended I couldn’t see her, fled across the dance floor from her, but could never escape. The tension broke when she came up behind me and touched my back.

“Tickle, tickle, tickle! The fairies are tickling you!” She said. I turned and growled in her face. A real growl, deep in my throat and meant to convey meaning. Then I stalked away.

She never tried to dance with me after that, but I saw her watching me, hands making the motions of magic, channeling some force to or from me. It scared me - I believe in magic -  and I put up a wall to stop her. In the days to come, I built walls of fire and mirrors of glass. Walls of brambles with thorns like swords to keep her at bay.

Every time she comes to dance now, the dance is a reminder of the need to hold my walls.

Today I notice her leaving just as I’m leaving. What if she’s going the same place I’m going? I think in the back of my mind, and dismiss it.

Sitting in the circle at the grief ritual, she is the last to arrive. I begin laughing, silently shaking at the perfection of it. Here too, you need thorns to feel.

---

Papa gives me the third song. It’s the evening after I’ve gotten home and regaled him with my story. “Bummer,” he says. “I have a song for you.”

He finally pulls it out as I’m making dinner. I turn the oven on to preheat and set myself to constructing a casserole as I settle into Leonard Cohen’s words.

“Even though she sleeps upon your satin
Even though she wakes you with a kiss
Do not say the moment was imagined
Do not stoop to strategies like this.”

I remember then, the last time she kissed me. Half asleep as she rose for her morning prayer, she kissed me as if reminding herself, fortifying her day with my lips, and I loved her for it.

This needs to be a pasta casserole I decide. I put water on to boil before realizing I’ll be leaving the oven on too long. Rather than just turning the oven off, I decide to make a pie to bake in the meantime. There’s no time to freeze the dough, but then I’ve never tried making a fast pie, maybe I’ve been lied to and pies are better unchilled.

“Upheld by the simplicities of pleasure
They gain the light, they formlessly entwine
And radiant beyond your widest measure
They fall among the voices and the wine.”

I try not to dwell on the simplicities of our pleasure. My heart aches at it, at what we were building together, but I have a pie to make.

For filling I pick some blackberries out back as the crust is pre baking, and that not being enough, fill with baker’s chocolate and molasses. I carefully lattice the top and set it in just as my pasta is coming to a boil.

“As someone long prepared for the occasion
In full command of every plan you wrecked
Do not choose a coward’s explanation

That hides behind the cause and the effect”

It is the mature song to grieve to. A reminder that I cannot hide, and I have to admit everything that is true, piece by bloody piece.

The pie comes out. It’s the worse pie I’ve ever made in my life. The crust is dense and hard, the bakers chocolate didn’t melt, making blobs of pure bitterness among too much sweet.

I have given her a piece of every pie I’ve made since she told me my apple pie was the best she’d ever had so long ago. Why stop now? I decide. I do not for a moment question the maturity of this.

---

After I have written down my dreams, and descended from the nest that is my bed, I head to the nettle patch for breakfast. There is a slant of sun across the lawn I cross to get there, and cross returning with basket heaped with less tops than I would like.

I am there, caught in the sun when I hear it. My roosters are finally crowing. It sings across my heart and I stand there transfixed, and crow with him inside as he cries again.

There is so much hidden in a rooster’s crow. There is triumph in who he is, an acceptance of his place in the world and a joy in it. There is the fierce protection of what is his, the admonishment that he cannot protect what he does not have dominion over. Stay close, that crow says. Don’t go too far.

And again I am struck by the rightness of it. In all this grief it is easy to pick out the things that shine brighter. The unshadowed moments when I know the necessities of my future. When I know the power of a rooster’s crow.

---

I ask her for the tupperware back. I’d given her the awful pie in mama’s glass, having nothing else that would fit. She won’t be home before the ritual, she tells me, but gives me permission to retrieve it on my own. I put the remains of the pie on a plate and wash it in her sink, and then make my way to her room. I sit there, in the spot where she ended things, and remember. Trying to recapture the exact feeling of it.

She came to me four days ago, tiptoeing into my room as my mother slept and murmuring how much she misses me, to tell me that she’d take it all back if she could. The grief didn’t go away then, but changed from an iridescent blue to the color of sunset, streaking across my mind. The confusion of why am I still sad? What am I grieving? But the ache of her is still there and the mind must struggle to make sense of this body’s knowledge

I sit in her room, lay back where I cried, and remember. I am grieving this, a betrayal, a sense of her, of me, a loss of something that can never be taken back. She knows there is no returning, only the turning ever forward into whatever comes next.

When I have remembered, I gather my tears up from the carpet like pearls and put them in my pocket to take with me. I will take them out and swallow them one by one in the coming hours.

---

Songs keep coming. There is a time when every song ever written about love is made sharp by inference. Country is almost too hot to touch. Pop has a rhythm to lean into and avoid the words, but so much of music is meant to evoke these emotions that sit so close to the surface now.

And I am a dancer. There is a continual road of music that I walk and cannot escape from. They fade and fall behind me, rise before me as if intimations of what is to come.

Omens. As I am falling asleep it occurs to me that on new years I stayed up listening to one song over and over again, captured by how different it was from my own experience. If only I had the capacity to be like this, I thought. To live in this halfway world.

“Cause you got that James Dean daydream look in your eye

And I got that red lip, classic thing that you like

And when we go crashing down, we come back every time

'Cause we never go out of style, we never go out of style”

Over and over as the night grew later, embedding my year with Taylor Swift.

“You've got that long hair slick back, white t-shirt

And I got that good girl fate and a tight little skirt (A tight little skirt)

And when we go crashing down, we come back every time

'Cause we never go (We never go) out of style, we never go out of style”

---

Maybe I should listen to my body, I think. “What do you think body?”
“I would like to be inside of her as soon as possible.”
“Genitalia you do not speak for body. What about you fingers?”
“I want to trace her skin with my fingertips”
“Ugh, breath?”
“I like to blow along her inner thighs . . . “
“Fine, I guess body is united - heart?”
“It hurts.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“It hurts.”
“Okay - head?”
“Basic game theory, if you’re playing over an extended period you have to precommit and stand by those precommitments. You have pre committed in order to stop her  from pressing that red button, and since she has, you have to press that red button right back.”
“Okay heart - it looks like you’re the tie breaker.”
“. . . It hurts . . . “