Work Text:
dear
funeral flower
my friend
salutations! :)
condolences on the loss of
congratulations on
i have always felt
you should know that i
…
Calla,
I think sometimes that after my life is over you will still have me in your hands, for a while. Or, no. Not me. You will have a cooling lump of organic matter I used to live inside. I used to be the life of? I used to be. And anyway, your hands will be on the skin of that body, and the face, and the spine, and the round bones of the shoulders, and you will not want to touch it. You’ll feel so many things in the touching of it. And the angle of the neck will be wrong, and there won’t be any breath inside at all. No air or soul or brain that sparks and dreams and understands. And you will know that, because you’re not stupid, because you face things that are factual even when you don’t like that they are, because you’ve always been like that, for as long as I’ve known you, which is all the space and time of my life, in all the directions it branches, until the end.
It’s one reason I love you. (Loved you? Will love you?) That pragmatism.
But even knowing, you won’t be able to let go, for a while, however much it does hurt not to. You’ll keep looking for me in that dead meat shape, I think. Like I am only hiding, or very far away within it, and not really gone at all.You’ll keep looking at the flesh and bone parts that knit together and made a body that was a person or had a person inside it— a woman you cared for. (Care for? Will care for?) For a little while, you’ll keep trying to unbreak me. To un-end my life with the holding.
I wish you wouldn’t. I wish you won’t. I’d tell you not to, if I could be there. I would tell you to lift your hands away. There’s no need for that pain. This isn’t your fault. Or Maura’s. Or the Coca-Cola boy’s. (Adam’s. I remember now.) I would say something like that, I think sometimes.
But I won’t be there, of course.
I won’t be anywhere.
Or I’ll be everywhere, but not in such a way that you would recognize me. Not a way you’ll understand inside your own life.
Is there a difference?
——
The first time I saw you— but I remembered it before, I think, and I remember it after, and I remember it sometimes when it never even happened– usually I was in a tree. I am, I will be in a tree. Or, on the surface of the tree, but far away from the ground. I climbed up there. It was a type of conversation, the climbing process, a communication between girl and wood. But I wasn’t very good at that type of thing, and my feet were pierced by little sharp splinters of tree, and I didn’t recognize what it was they were trying to say.
I pulled the messages out of my feet on a high branch, and the wind made the fabric over my legs billow up like the sails of a ship at sea, and the wind made the dead filaments growing out of my living scalp (see, remember, how a human body is never quite completely one thing or the other?) float and writhe around my face like white snakes, or clouds. And I was saying all the words I knew at that time were supposed to be curses because it seemed painful, it hurt, pulling the splinter shards out of my naked, new flesh. I was very new, I think. I was very young, and I’d become a different shape quite recently, and I still was not used to it.
I wasn’t very good at communicating yet, as I mentioned. But I was learning. I was a student, I was a student at the school where the tree was growing (as I am never not a student in all my life— there’s always another teacher, another lesson to be found, it seems like).
And anyway, and so, there were human speech sounds underneath the tree, and I knew you were there, I knew both of you were there, and my heart leapt and my throat felt chalky, and I looked past my splintered foot and further down, all the way to the ground, and you— both of you— looked up.
And Maura was so young, and she had freckles on her shoulders, and her boots weren’t old and scuffed then, they were still shiny and almost unworn, and she shifted from side to side like her feet were hurting, too. “Hello?” she called up, like a question. “Are you all right?”
And you were so young, and your hair was the color you’d put on your mouth to kiss me, later, and you stood solid and rooted as though you were a tree yourself. There was metal in your nose and in your ears and you were frowning at me the way you frown at crossword puzzles you can’t figure out right away, the way you frown at guests with strange auras and signs you’re not sure how to read. You didn’t cup your hands in front of your mouth to hold your voice like Maura, which I appreciated because my hearing was fine and it really was not necessary for her to do that. You kept your arms tightly folded underneath your breasts.
“You’re going to fall, silly girl!” you growled.
And I did, I fell. The branch cracked another message and came away from its wooden body, and I fell. I fell through the air to the earth below. You were right.
You usually are.
——
I want, I wanted, I will want to write this down, like a letter. Or, like a series of letters that turn into words that turn into sentences that turn into my thoughts, imperfectly rendered but honest and true, traveling to your eyes and brain across great distances. I want you to know I love you. That’s a reason people write letters, isn’t it? They shout love at other minds from very far away, in ink.
But you would only read the words after I died and could not tell you things with my mouth or my hands or my cards or my dreams. I think then it’s not a love letter. I think then it’s something else, and it might make you angry, and it might make you cling to me more than you should.
——
Maura is making a new person. Maura’s daughter has started to happen. (Her father, I think, is already gone.) It’s not obvious yet, not just from looking at the outside of Maura, but we all know.
Sometimes, when Maura has taken her not-yet-child and herself into another room where they can’t hear us, you tell me you’re worried. Worry makes you irritable. You talk about responsibility. You talk about danger. You knock back a glass of orange juice like its a shot of whiskey, because thats how you drink everything when you get stressed. You drink it like it’s medicinal. It’s so funny. Maybe that’s partly why you do it?
There’s no alcohol in the orange juice, though, so I get the bottle of vodka out from under the sink in case you want there to be, and to put some in my cherry cola.
“Persephone,” you say, with your palm clasped to the safe skin of your forehead, like you’re trying to read your own mind, “sometimes I just think it’s cruel. Cruel, or idiotic: bringing a goddamn child into, into all this.” I don’t know whether you mean: this the kitchen, this the house, this the shape of our persons in connection with one another— this family we are making. This state of Virginia. This world. I don’t ask for clarification. I don’t think it really matters in this case. This.
You heave a very intense sigh. “Sometimes I just think— what good can come of it?” you ask.
“Lots,” I tell you. “I think many things will come of it. Someone will be alive. I mean, someone new. That’s usually good.” I have trouble with “good” and “bad” sometimes, but I believe that I believe this, about being alive. Also, I’m trying to reassure you.
You pour too much vodka into your empty glass, then cover it with the last of the orange juice. You roll your eyes at me, but half your purple mouth pulls itself into a smile. “That was a rhetorical question, Persephone Smartass.”
“That is not my last name, Calla.”
“Could’ve fooled me.” You reach over to touch the dead part of my body. You run your hand through my hair.
——
I’m not very good with names. You never hold that against me. I know who people are, and that’s enough.
The first time you find the courage to cover my mouth with your own, to put my breath between your teeth, I’ll be thinking of you as the girl with hair the color of fake grape candy, and metal through her skin to make it seem like she’s not as scared of pain and permeability as she really is. I’ll be thinking of you as the girl who likes bacon, who makes it every single morning for those two weeks Maura decides she isn’t eating anything dead (or alive) unless it is a plant. I’ll be thinking of you as the woman who makes us tend our wounds, who keeps peroxide and bandages and all kinds of things on hand, in case. I’ll be thinking of you as a pair of hands, holding my life and my death. Holding a series of objects that sing sad, violent, beautiful songs the rest of us can’t hear. Holding what used to be me after my soul and life have fallen away. Holding Maura’s daughter, holding Blue as she sees the world for the first time and screams out her arrival.
— —
When I looked out the window, I saw Maura putting plants in the dirt. Her hands were covered in soil, and she was pregnant enough that she had a hard time bending over the patch of garden. She was singing, then, out loud, so I listened. It was that song about the plane crash. You and Maura both say she can’t carry a tune for love or money, and I suppose that’s true, but she can definitely sing. (Maybe not for money, but there’s usually love involved.) Her voice never leaves her, and she remembers all the words, always, every repetition. It’s very soothing.
“We all got up to dance,” sang Maura. “Oh! But we never got the chance!”
It’s an odd song. It’s happy and sad at the same time, which suits Maura. Which suits us all, maybe. It is a good song to sing to a fetus, to prepare it for human life.
I went outside to tell Maura that, and she laughed. She did that thing where she snorts at the end, and it made me laugh, too, and I told her she was going to pass that one down to her daughter, like brown skin and freckles and being unlucky in love, the kissing sort of love, when it comes to men. She laughed even harder after that. “I guess there are worse fates,” she said to me. “But let’s not be too pessimistic about that last one just yet.”
— —
When I looked out the window, I saw Maura putting plants in the dirt. She was thinner, and older, and there were lines by her eyes. Her hands were covered in soil, and she was singing again, belting at the sky as though the sky could hear, if she projected enough. “I met a girl who sang the blues! I asked her for some happy news! She just smiled and turned away!”
I thought I might go outside and tell her I didn’t think that was supposed to be one of the loud, joyful parts of that song, but I couldn’t seem to find my feet, or my voice.
And Blue ran around the side of the house, and she was very young but she was a woman, or nearly a woman. She was as old as I will be when you meet me, I think. “Mom!” she hissed, in a way that did not sound truly angry. “Mom, stop being embarrassing! I swear, someone’s going to file a noise complaint one of these days, you and Gwenllian in the same backyard now. I swear to God, Mom. This isn’t helping.”
Maura’s daughter had freckles on her shoulders, and spiky hair like the crest of a bird, and her mother’s old boots that were once new, now soft and scuffed and almost falling apart. And I can’t quite say why, but I was pleased to see it was, it is, it will be so.
——
Calla, you can’t keep any human here. I can’t either. None of us can. We can’t even keep ourselves.
But there will always be people, all the days of your life. There will be many lives that intersect with yours, and many kinds of connection. No matter who leaves, someone else will be arriving. Not the same, perhaps, but just as important. I don’t know. I think this has to be enough. I think that it probably must be.
You cannot stop people from making the choices they make. You can’t stop them from dying when they run up against the hard edges of the shapes that are their finite lives (all lives, I think, are finite?) and leak out into forever, dissolving.
There was nothing you could have done to save me, I think. And you would only have saved me for a little while, anyway.
Please, try not to think of that as something terrible. It’s what it is. Will be. Has always already been.
— —
Not a love letter. The other thing. The other kind. A suicide note? No. I never mean to die on purpose. Not exactly. It’s just that I can see my death no matter where I am, no matter how hard I try not to, no matter how near or far away I am. I see all my deaths. I accept them when they come to me.
Eulogy? Elegy? Last will and testament?
Memoir? Apology? Explanation?
——
I think you’ll understand.
You usually do, even if it takes you a while to get there.
— —
I’m standing at the top of the house, the highest part, and I’m going to do something, and I’m going to die doing it. So it goes.
There’s a mirror, and I see all the world inside it. I see the boy— Adam— who will finish what I start, frowning perplexedly at something made of many interlocking parts. I see numbers and signs and wonders. I see little Blue, crying. Blue, on the back of some huge animal, riding it through an unclear space. I see every woman who will ever pass through these walls, this home. The trees talk to me, and the things that live in the dark underground whisper into parts of my consciousness that nobody, ever, ought to be able to access. I see you, Calla, lipstick crossword-puzzle frowning arms crossed, unaware yet that anything more has gone wrong, and did we argue last time we spoke? I don’t remember. I hope we didn’t. I wish we hadn’t. I look for Maura. I look for answers. I ask a question.
I see my death in the mirror, and she has my own face. I feel myself falling, and I can’t go back.
— —
I’m standing in the kitchen. I am making a pie. Cherry. My hands are white with flour. You and Maura are using knives to divide other food, and Maura gets distracted by something, just slightly, just for a moment, and she slices her own finger instead of what we’re going to eat.
When the boundary of a human being is breached in this way, blood rushes out to meet the air. It’s not red inside the body, under the skin, but it turns the color of cherries, of wine, of rust when it swells free.
A chemical reaction is a kind of dialogue.
Communications, boundary-breachings, shape and change us. Make us all what we are.
Sometimes, this is a shock.
Maura makes a terrible noise and falls to the ground, grasping at her body with bloodied hands. It’s not right, I think, for a cut middle finger. Even with all that blood pouring from the knuckle, the fish mouth of the wound? It’s disproportionate. I don’t understand. This time, I’m the slow one. What’s happening seems very far away.
“FUCK,” yells Maura, who rarely swears. “ SWEET LOVING CHRIST ON A BIKE! Calla! Persephone! I think I’m having the baby!”
“You mean right now?” I ask.
“No, Persephone, last weekend!” you snap. “Of course she means right now! Clean your hands and help! Get Jimi! Call that number on the fridge! Pink sticky note, upper lefthand corner! Now, Persephone!”
The kitchen smells like the sea. The kitchen smells vaguely metallic.
Maura screams.
Something begins, and it’s going to take a long time to stop beginning.
There’s pain, and there’s blood, there is so much blood, and oh, it is lovely.
——
I’m standing on the front porch, listening to the sounds insects make for all their brief lives, their chirring messages to each other. I’m standing on the front porch, looking at bright lights that are very far away and take centuries to deliver themselves to my eyes. Old suns shining. You come to stand beside me, there in the summer night, and you don’t say anything in words, which is fine because words are unnecessary right now.
You turn to me and you place one of your hands on one of my arms, and the other hand on the arm opposite. Like you are holding me still, or holding me together. My heart beats a little faster, and I stand on the balls of my feet, I practically float up to meet your mouth with mine. I bite your lower lip, painted and full, like it’s always already been bruised by my teeth, and I bite it again. I taste salt. I taste copper. You laugh, or growl, somewhere low in your throat, and your tongue is in my mouth now. We’re speaking in tongues.
This isn’t the first time, and this isn’t the last time. This is one of all the many uncountable times between those two, but I like it almost the best. I will not ever forget it. I think I won’t.
The heat caresses us, touching our sticky skin like a third person, a body of air. It’s heavy, pollen-filled. You lift me off the surface of the porch and carry me through the door, because you’re strong, and you like to show off, and I like to be suspended above things, when I can be.
If there’s anyone else in the house now, we don’t meet them on the stairs.
We go to my room, and your hands are up around my hips, under the black lace of my skirt, grasping bare skin because I forgot about underwear today, before we even make it to my bed. You touch me like I’m a physiological need. You touch me like we’re holy communion. You touch me like a message. You touch me like you’re trying to tell me a story I have to hear before I die, like I am a student and you are a lesson.
———
And after, I remember, we lay beside each other in the dark, just breathing and twitching. For a little while, we were only two women lying in the dark, our skin barely touching, our sweat drying up, the air full of sex and the whirr of the ceiling fan. For a little while, I could almost not know any possible future, or any possible past, or anything but the time I inhabited in that handful of moments, the time I inhabited with you. I felt my heart, and my bones, and the exact outline of my body, each plane and surface stroked and bitten and licked into my precise human shape, and I was nothing more than that, and I thought I might love you infinitely, living-body-beside-this-living-body. I thought perhaps we could love each other forever, and there would be no end. I really thought that, briefly, listening to the insects through wood and plaster and fiberglass insulation and the spirals of my two ears.
——
Silly girl.
You’re going to fall.
———
It takes a long time for me to hit the ground, after my branch breaks. I’m still hurtling through the air, making all my muscles go as loose and limp as I can so I might not be too badly hurt. I’m watching the inevitable rush towards me. It’s hard and green and full of changing life, it’s promising blood, and you and Maura stand there with your faces turned upwards as I descend.
When I land, I’ll land on my back (the safe way), so my eyes will also be turned towards the sky. It will be blue and pure and cloudless. It will be like a mirror in which I can’t see anything but that one color and the movements of air particles. Or, no. It will be a sky that’s nothing but itself. My body will fold into a V shape at the waist, and my breath will be gone. It will come back, but for a moment, I’ll try to inhale and feel only that absence, and a pain like bruising deep inside my chest. I’ll have scratches on my arms and legs, from littler tree branches I hit on the way down. Scrapes. Skinned ankle. I’ll blink at you and at Maura when you come to lean over me.
“Good lord,” Maura will say.
“Shit,” you’ll say. “The hell were you thinking?”
And both of you will reach down with outstretched hands to help me stand up, but in spite of your general problems with touch, you, Calla, you’ll reach first. And that is how we meet.
——
There are too many words in my head.
There are too many words.
This is just one story. I’m not sure if it’s adequate.
———
But I think I must have told you out loud, with my voice, that I loved you. At least once, surely? And Maura, and Blue, and even Orla and Jimi.
I’ve loved many people in my life, actually. In my own manner. However poor I’ve sometimes been at communicating that love in ways that were understood. However distant. Trying to reach you like light from somewhere very cold and empty.
It doesn’t matter. You know.
I want, I wanted you to know. But I know you must know. I remember that now.
You know, Calla– I was always thinking it. I put it into every gesture I made, every book or card or cup or pen or needle or rind or insect or seed I ever touched.
A sentence is such a small, flat thing compared to that.
———
I think I’m done being a student now. I think I will be done being a student one day. When I finish falling. I think it’s a good thing to have been.
I understand so much. Not enough. Never enough. Still.
…It was good, wasn’t it? As far as I can ever understand.
I think so.
sincerely yours
goodbye
hello
until we meet again & again & again &
please don’t break that wineglass
be kind to Adam he is a promising young man and he tries his very best and he should have my cards after i’ve died i think as then i will not need or want them and they are useful devices
love, of course,
and thank you,
Persephone