A Note: it is almost my birthday AND a long weekend Monday here in Canada so as a thank you to subscribers for your readership, I am unlocking this paid letter from August 15, 2023 for you to read. Please know, I take your witness here so deeply to heart. And it is from the heart that these letters flow: right from mine to yours.
. . I ask for help planting a hydrangea in the backyard where there was once a blank patch of soil and weeds. It’s a snowball, the tag promising large white globes of flowers. The heat wilts the bush to the ground every afternoon. I do not water it. Rain comes most early evenings and lifts the leaves. I watch the plant from the window with interest. It’s supposed to bloom late, in the early fall, but I wonder if it will at all. It can be difficult to thrive even under the best of circumstances, which it never is.
I’m trying to rest but I’m not teaching in these months so I try to write more but it’s going slowly because I am so tired. I make small calendars on giant yellow Post-Its.
Three days OFF, I write to myself but it sounds more like a threat than a promise.
*
Night lightening is so bright I think someone is taking a flash photograph when I wake up. The thunder is immediate. My rings rattle in their dish beside my bed. The lamp sways above me. My heart is pounding but I am not scared of storms. It’s just that loud.
My friends meet me at the patio, the pub, the badminton court, the park. There are little, sugary treats and none of our tan lines make any sense. Ankle mobility, bathroom tiles, heat death, do you like your therapist? What we talk about now versus what we talked about then: we talk about that too.
*
I have to pee at a beach that doesn’t have any outhouses so my boyfriend holds a yellow striped towel around me. The sea is deep blue and so cold it seizes my breath for a moment, even though I only go in to my ankles. My brother-in-law dives in wholly and while he’s laughing, when he comes back out, he tells us that he’s numb.
It’s always later than I think.
Someone else is cooking. There’s bay leaves and spicy salt. I’m playing Hearts at a kitchen table that is not mine. I needed to learn the rules for the card game I grew up playing. It has been that long. In the first hand out, the Queen of Spades drops but can it? We try to see if it’s a rule but we can’t find anything definitive. We decide it cannot. We decide in this house, everyone is safe.
At first, we add, because we all know.
*
Emails pile up.
*
I go to the hospital for a bone scan. I am a part of a research study tracking bone composition and density over a period of time. Five years ago, I went to the same hospital, for the same scans.
I sit in the same room I was interviewed in before. A woman asks if my medical history had changed. I show her my wallet card that describes my stent and I explain my current medications.
I am taken to the same imaging room as before. I recognize the technician.
I did your scans last time, she says.
For the scans to be useful and accurate, I have to be positioned in exactly the same way as I was in the past. I lay on the scanner bed and the tech gently pushes and pulls my limbs.
There, she finally says. Perfect.
Some of the imaging takes almost ten minutes to complete. I lay beneath the humming machine and close my eyes.
Imagine this is true: It’s a time portal.
Then: to travel, hold your body perfectly still. Maintain the position of the past.
So: When you open your eyes, he will be alive. You will leave this lab and he will be alive.
When the scans are finished, the technician tells me with pleasure that the images are nearly identical.
Nearly —
A whole universe disappears.
*
His phone is too old. I charge it every month, turn it on, but this month it has missed too many software updates. It will not even link to the Internet. All I can do now is access the apps that do not require a connection.
I am always listening for his knock on the door. He never rang.
*
On a run beside the river, I jump over a liquid pile of goose shit, the grown geese hissing at me as their gangly teenage geese try to hiss as well, but they’re just too small. On another, a branch rises from the ground slowly. It is a snake which is a surprise to me who is yelping. I have not run for six years, a practice halted by pain that I could not overcome. Now, there are new limits I must accept if I want to continue. Slower. Less.
I wake up in tears.
*
My sneakers slide on a stone shore. Tree trunks become bleached benches become heavy with the weight of all of us, taking a break to look at the ocean.
My friend who is sad like me sits across the room beneath the only light turned on in her apartment. It turns her cheekbones into shadows.
(The way everything blurs. This season of slipping. What do we call it when we’re teaching? The summer slide?)
My friend who is sad, and me, who is sad, are not talking about it, but we are, we are talking about it: What is love like after love?
There is a large, black boulder out in the surf.
It is constantly turning to tell him. I am always trying to reach him with the news.
*
Important information about you. That’s what the email subject line from an unknown sender reads. Google thinks it’s junk but I open it anyway.
Three years since he died feels like a short time but it’s been a long time since I’ve heard him talk in his sleep. And, it is always arriving. The trees outside my window this morning showed scattered yellow amid the green. I move his wedding ring from my left hand to my right hand.
*
HE IS SO GONE.
*
I take the dogs for a walk and it’s too hot—it’s too hot everywhere. Almost immediately, their tongues loll pink and long so I stop, offer them water from the bottle I have brought for them. One drinks but the other will not.
Take, I beg the one who will not. Take what you need.
When I touch the dog’s sides, they are small suns themselves. Their hair is everywhere, with me even when they are not. Woven into my t-shirt. Beneath my fingernails. On my tongue.
Stunning, as usual. Sending a virtual hug.
Thank you for unlocking this to the free subscribers. It was a pleasure to read and not miss some of the important changes in you. I won't call it healing yet, but the changes are positive, even the ones like slowing down, not running so blindingly fast, etc., and we care.