An essay published in Perception Magazine.
Golden lamps and candlelight illuminate my midnight bedroom of blankets and bookshelves. Side tables grow cluttered with half-empty glasses and stale mugs of chamomile tea. There is just enough moonlight to see; the mirage of a star-ridden sunrise. My porcelain skin and freckled arms are gently traced by a boy that I love. Our heads rest upon branded pillows where the feathers stick out and the cases slide off. Comfortably buried alive under an indigo duvet, childhood dissolved into adolescence into adulthood.
I collapse into his arms with melancholy limbs, connecting constellations under the sheets. Our conversations ricochet as we speak of the Everything and the Nothing: What goes viral then forgotten. Zodiacs and makeshift fates. Wizards of Waverly Place. Parenting styles, attachment styles, vintage styles. The fading memory of a lucid grandparent. The Everything and the Nothing in the palm of our hands, ebbs and flows as our fingers interlock
I witnessed death the week before. Daily trips to sterilized hospital hallways where crucifixes lined the walls and cycles of delusion circled my ears. Hands cold as ice, rotten skin, and food untouched; a muted contemplation of what lives on the other side. My grandmother considered reincarnation and told a tale of a Nautical Return.
“I wouldn’t mind coming back as one of those,” her voice trembled under her words and grabbed my attention. She pointed to the seahorses dancing in the ocean behind her television screen. Lovely, twisted, and morbid, I shuddered at these deathly desires. On walks to the restroom with the sole purpose of escape, I found myself petrified by accidental side-eyes into ICU rooms, whilst in awe of the hospice workers that filled their lives with the End. I remembered the day gravity gave out on her, nothing but denial to break the fall. I extended my hand and poured strength into her shivering arm; my youth into her shriveling fingertips.
I grappled with the sight of death, a reminder of limited time. Forced to wrap my head around the cellophane of the unknown, the evils of the Supreme Court, and the mass shooting that headlined the news, my soul flatlined and my body went numb. Grief bottled up and stored away, humming and chiming an Ode to my Feeble Heart.
June bled into July as the country launched colorful rockets into questionably independent skies. I pressed my forehead against the glass of a sweaty Uber’s backseat window. My eyes glossed over in childlike awe as the night came to life. A vibrant firework show lit up the side of the road. Nothing existed outside of the prisms of reds and pinks. An echoing array of booms and crashes added rhythm to the glittering spirals. Combustions reflected in my green eyes and raw feeling returned to my bloodstream. I was in a trance of anticipation, some sort of violent peace. The grand finale of a gun-powder-parade erupted through the sky, overshadowing the stars and Venus and Jupiter. Then, all that remained was an eerily quiet aftermath, as the silence felt amplified. I was unsatisfied. I wanted more. My brain felt riddled with fog like the ash that fills the night – the very ashes of a body short of a soul.
The boy that I love sprinted towards the Texas sun to sit in the stillness by my side. He offers me his shoulder as we share a pillow and a piano bench. We eat bagels for breakfast every morning and write little notes in the margins of our hearts. We exchange T-shirts and compliments as I bask in the comfort of his cologne. I told him I felt helpless to the passage of time and divulged the images stuck in the corners of my mind.
But after so many chord progressions and poppyseeds, a smile returns to the surface. Shared days of funeral arrangements and heavy boxes and paper cuts from photo-stacks. Oh, how unfair it is to hyperfixate on the End of a life well lived! A dusty depiction of her mini-skirts and passionate eyes, wedding dresses and the stories she told in circles. The Everything and the Nothing in the palm of my hand, the entire scope of the human experience.