A Love Sometimes Unrequited

Musings of a funeral service attendee. 8-14-16

I was absent at the service that day, the Friday that the bells tolled dismal and there was hardly sun enough to light the stained glass of the cathedral walls. It was all ashes and dust motes, gathered in the air and in my lungs, sparse and dense with humidity. One hundred shadow people sat in shiny wooden pews in their death day best, and even in the most sombre moment of my life I could not reign in the part of me that waxed poetic about beauty and loss and the crushing silence of the universe in response. I watched incensed smoke curl its way into dissipation at the same time my consciousness receded, and I stood watching it until there was nothing at all and the most I saw was empty air. 

Time tapped its fingers along my spine, up and down the column of bone as if impatient. Let’s go, it whispered against my skin, Let’s set fire to this past-tense sadness and leave it to smolder. It sat with one hand in mine and kept tapping tapping tapping, a steady flinching in time with my echoing heartbeat, a dull pulse deep in the cage of my ribs. Why is it, I wanted to ask, that this pliant, apathetic thing in my chest must be restrained so solidly. When arms that cradle me, candles like winking satellites, when voices small as the place between atoms that tell me about sorrow are not enough even to stir it? It is a divided city nestled somewhere in me, and it makes me wonder how I’m supposed to have the answers to every implied question when I can’t even tell you exactly where my heart sits amidst muscle and sinew. Moreover, I want to ask myself where this metaphorical pitcher is, the one that sits in wait until the day it overflows so it may spill all at once. I want to meet the one in charge, tell them I am tired of feeling nothing everything nothing everything nothing. You may call this defense mechanism, I’d say, survival of the fittest, but it is so exhausting to be on or off and never in between. It’s never just a little bit, and here my voice may shake as the pitcher wobbled unbalanced, it is too much all at once, except when it’s nothing but empty, nothing but dust motes in my lungs, nothing but the stillness that falls on a place long abandoned. 

It is here that Time would tighten in my hold, rhythm never faltering, and murmur with the voice of shuffling feet and the subdued hum of sorrowed voices. Time has always sounded different, like shifting sunlight and subconscious blinking and sometimes the rush of wind against your ears or in your throat. 

“You hate me. You think I ruin lives.” Somewhere in the midst of rustling dresses and humming ceiling fans, there exists the chance of reproachfulness. 

“No- Yes- I don’t know. You are everything and anything, and in that way I think we are very similar. But sometimes you do unforgivable things.”

“That is how this goes, and you know that. You know it though it is scrawled across your eyelids in a different language every night, you know it though you have no hope of translating it.”

“I know that I wish you would grant me a minute of peace. Can’t you leave me be?” I do not know if I am more tired or pleading, but the breath that sighs passed my lips is steady.

Time has one arm around my waist, one hand tugging the hem of my dress, singing resonantly with the voice of an organ. Time is slow or fast but never still. I hear its words carded gently against my skin anyway.

“I would, darling, but I am the blood in your veins and the inhale of your lungs, and there does not exist any place in this entire universe that you could be without me. And for all your qualms, love, I hear every love song you whisper for me in the daylight. I am your weakness and you are mine, though I know that you will leave me one day, just like everyone before you.”