For a few months after I died, she sent me postcards. It was nice, kind of bittersweet. Sometimes they were the store-bought ones from the corner pharmacy, with rosy images of the pier sunsets and cutesy streets I knew better than anyone. How are you getting along? I’m ok, I went to the zoo yesterday and saw the river otters. Smelled them too. When the pharmacy closed, she made her own, cardstock with ink drawings: elephants, butterfly-faced women, trees that seemed to move and dance across the grain of the paper. Hi again, hope you’re well, still wish you were… you know. That only lasted a week or so.
The intervals between postcards began to stretch. The ink drawings disintegrated, each new generation containing more white emptiness and less of those specific, thin black or blue lines she made with the pen, encompassing reality to fit her mind’s eye. It was like watching her let me go. Let me float as the reverse gravitation of After wants to do, let the strings of not-breath pull me through various layers of cloud and ozone until the atmosphere became a dream, or my body a dream to the earth and what we all know as real. Before. Eventually the mailbox by my parents’ old house was devoid of the postcards for a full four weeks and I stopped coming to check. Feeling the emptiness every day seemed to make it more so, though I know that’s not how it works.
I should have been proud of her for being able to let go, to move on, but honestly I felt a bit miffed at being left behind. As the living, it was her right and her best interest to focus on herself and the other living; while I was alive I used to marinate her in sermons against the kind of obsessive neuroticism she tended to engage in. Talking for hours about some rude stranger she’d never see again. Tsk-tsk-tsk. But now it seems, the way things are, my existence is exactly contingent on the ever-diaphanizing string between her memory and my coughed-up cloud. I sense that when she forgets me totally, I will forget how to keep my molecules together in this form.
I can already taste them drifting farther apart, in my tongue. My morning nectar is bitter in one part of my mouth and then at a thunder-count’s distance it seems another part tastes it as sour, and sweet in an island amidst a sea of — nothing. And — I don’t feel ready to move on. I don’t feel ready to forget. I know it’s not about me, anymore. But there’s just something — I don’t know. I feel this itch in the space where my collarbone would be, like there’s something I’ve forgotten, some loose end to tie up, some mess to clean once and for all. But I can’t remember what. My parents are gone, the house empty and overgrown, all my stuff sold, given away or burned. Except the things I gave to her, if you count them. Like the necklace.
The necklace. She still has it. That’s why I’m still somewhat cohesive, here. As long as she keeps it, I’ll be able to stay. Is that the thing I’m forgetting? Tying up the ends of the necklace? I don’t know, but if I meddle a little with the string/glass/box, maybe I’ll at least buy myself some time to figure out the answer. Construct an answer satisfactory enough to let me dissipate in peace. Honestly sometimes I think the reason I’m here has nothing to do with her at all. But everyone else from Before is already escaping like watercolor in the wash, it’s all white sheets circling in my raining mind. I stashed the postcards in an abandoned pigeons’ nest behind the roof tiles of the old house. Some of them are written in a language I can no longer read. Later there are no words.
** inspired in part by The Line Tender by Kate Allen
A Seaworthy Frigate 