Project 4: Mary Don't you Weep

I ‘was here,’ until I’m not. Blackboards erased, sidewalks repaved. An echo, captured like a toddler’s ant, flicked by the hum of your standing fan. I won’t unfold into view on your changed angles looking in the mirror. Would you want me to?

    Don’t weep.

                What’s happened, has happened. Take comfort in idiom—a truth underscores every trite comfort, there are no fewer bones in Mother’s hugs if mothers’ essence is to hug. There’s honesty in evasive monsters under the bed, just as there’s honesty in bowls of soup and Oreos aside Kleenex boxes on bedside tables. What has been heard before, has been true before, and though skeptics can cling to the uncertainty of rising suns, know that if you rise, it must have.  

                Don’t mourn.

                What’s planted is not prologue provided it’s perennial, like chrysanthemums and dirty dish disputes. Wreaths are bouquets bundled differently, and evergreens are more persistent than heart-dotted paper. Hay-fever and thorn-pricks signify spring and spring rains, blue-coated fires in hearths with cedar-scent, winter and New Year’s. Perspective is fickle.  

                Witches float and the sinless sink. Smoke ascends. Burning logs settle. Weight was bestowed on all full things.

                None of what’s above is true. None of what’s above is false. Reject all absolutes. Everything conforms to the perceiver—everything. Rorschach riddles, missing teeth no longer under pillows, three half-eaten cookies on a plate by the fireplace, missing cookies and empty jars and brushed teeth and lips dotted clean. There need not be someone taking things for things to get lost. And yet, I took a nap and I was gone, you took respite in things no longer there, we had taken each other’s words without proof of parted seas, and that all seemed fine.

                Here are things I promised, without any promise of possibility: to be your rock (whatever that meant)—igneous processes left things sedimentary; to be by your side—sometimes I led, sometimes I followed, but always one or the other; to be permanent—instead, I was incessant.

                But broken promises are not shattered idols. Only hoarders keep everything. To commit is to close your mind, and no one called for that. We were not in pieces, we were pieces, like kitchen tiling. I never felt you, nor you me, but we were always close by. There was no stubbed side of the wishbone. This was all fine. We kept each other, in moments.

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                For me: you crumpled yesterday’s newspaper for kindling, travel and obituary sections, opinions and Science Times. Your hair was down, your legs crossed. I had my tattoo. Our hands were chapped and our lips were chapped. We had cream and Vaseline, but what did it matter? I knew you could not see me when you talked, but I was there shimmering in the window’s reflection if you had just turned your head. You bemoaned another lost day and asked when would you get a breath, when would things end moving so fast. It was rhetorical. I respected your privacy. The fire sparked and you were still until the flames had crept up the pages to the twigs to the sticks, translated to the cackling cedar logs. I was sleepy and did not answer. But the rest was not silent.