Fragment - After Iggy dies

No one finds hospitals comforting, but, when the nurses on night shift are making hushed rounds and the fluorescent lights are off, and the whirring machines are your lullabies, it feels okay. Maybe even good.

The good part is that people holding onto their lives are generally on their best behaviour and they finally become the kind of folks you can trust. Between the laconic words of late night doctors and the raspy confessions of dying people, the earnesty here is overwhelming. Here you remain safely apart from free range liars of the world. She’s in and out of consciousness, and when her breathing gets shallow, you anticipate the turn of her body. In this light, her legs look yellow where they stick out from the bleached sheets. But she’s a beautiful as you’ve ever seen. Those dark curls over dark eyebrows over dark lashes. You lean forward and put your face against her. You’ve made a nest of things found in the waiting room, and of the jacket you brought her and the extra blanket that smells like home. Though she can’t smell she says.

Jello tastes good when you can’t smell. Then all you have is the texture which lets you tongue on the soft of it.

______

You imagine burning her bed. You imagine she gets up and moves across the room and says, light of my life, I am going back to Iran now, and her hair is on fire and her eyes are full and clear.

And as she walks out the door, the room is flushed of all meaning, the air is released from it along with the hope and the stories you built. The real and imagined.

In every story of heartache is a wound so deep, so profound, that the limits of language force the feeler to find a thing to compare it to. The results are clunky because language is limited, it’s a frame someone long ago conceived of to translate feeling, into action. And now as your lungs collapse and you inhale – exhale is felt by the world drawing in around you, shrinking about you suffocating atmosphere, and then, as the fear of aloneness sets in, and the great big world rushes out a tide withdrawing into the black and empty nothing, you feel the tiny insignificance of who you are. Every outstretched part of you splayed open and your body is still miniatured against the sky draining of oxygen.

When someone you love dies, you feel things that can’t be written. You feel the hard and soft parts, and the parts whose textures have no name. You swing out of time, you catch up with the spinning earth and slam down on its sides and cause it to be still, to have some fucking respect. You hate when it listens, you want nothing to be in your control because you are the guy that screws everything up. You’re the one who let her slip, you could have saved her if you wielded this much power when she was still bouncing around the world. God, it’s the stillness that you can’t believe – of this flesh in front of you, never to be animated again. And that’s okay, though it’s the flesh of her you often loved, it was your then body’s only way to understand her, and now that she walked out of here in a fire, bed in flames, you in the slow crush of smoke and pain, you understand with infinitely more parts of you. /30 Your body, brain, even your fucking breathing. This is the anguish of losing her and losing out on loving her with so much more of you open, every pore of you pointed toward the place she was, wanting the warm of it to stay a little longer. A cosmic negotiation you can’t win.

______

When they find you, you have a temperature, and they tend to you first, because, of the two bodies in the room, yours is the one they now care about. That feels disgusting because it shouldn’t be – that her utility in this world just vanished – how can you pore yourself into saving a person and then just walk away from the cold remains of them? A different set of specialists will take the vessel she left, the yellow legs, the hair. But you know better. That’s the part she left, when she walked out of the fire and back to Iran.

______

As they stick you with electrical readers, you briefly wonder about Yuna. Are they together, clasping hands? Has your dear wife found her alive in another universe, telling stories to children on her lap, eyes crinkling behind delicate spectacles?

Just bend forward and breathe, a voice says. You do as you’re told. Something cold on your back now. Is there someone coming for you? Another voice asks. You shake your head, no. Your wrist is squeeze by someone who believes that to be a kind gestures, but you can’t wait to live in a bunker and never feel the pleasantry of someone’s benign concern for you again. Your mother-vision of Eunice brings you to her chest and says – “It’s all very hard, this life. But I made you strong for a reason.” And in the end, that’s comforting.

______

The week after is raucous.

The week after that is blundering.

The week after that is contrite.

______

When the headlights of the bus come into view, you feel like you shouldn’t be there. What do you plan to do, just ride to the end of the route, turn back with the driver?

You brought a small notebook and a pen. You’re not much of a writer but maybe you’ll draw. You wonder if you’ve seen Alanka, the dancer, or the pious Bartolomeo. You wonder what you’d say: we made up stories about you. Do you have a gay daughter? It doesn’t work like that.

The mood on the bus is a maddening stillness. You’re not sure if it’s always like that or if they’re in mourning for her too. That must be Little Lucy putting her nose against the glass. Mother is not reading her dog-eared novel, she just stares forward in thought, thumb holding her page open. /30

You want to jostle everyone, you briefly imagine shaking their shoulders in this trance. This was the world you left, Farzana. We’re stagnant without you.