Distractions

in a time of grief

It’s been 48 days since Roland died, my not-quite-14-year-old dog who had some type of cancer we didn’t know about until it was too late to do anything to help. I wanted him to make it to our wedding, and he did. I wanted him to make it back to Florida, and he did. I wanted him to make it to his 14th birthday, but he didn’t. I held him in my arms as he went.

Eight days after Roland died, in the haze of grief and at my behest, we got a sweet puppy who wasn’t around even long enough to get a name. It’s been 41 days since the puppy died. We don’t know what happened, we just know he went downhill over less than 24 hours. Our house was a safe place for the end of his short little life. I held him in my arms as he went.

One month after Roland died, our pitbull Vix died. She got sick—she’d been sick, she was on her deathbed when her former family released her into our care seven months earlier—but this infection, a maybe meningitis, was too much for her body despite our best efforts. Lord knows, it had been seven months of our best goddamn efforts. I held her in my arms as she went.

Dogs are family. Dogs are unfailingly, unflinchingly, unequivocally capable of love, and I have always been a person who falls head over heels into love with them as a result. And, as my mother once said to me, life is a series of dogs. Still, I didn’t expect to watch three of them die unexpectedly over six weeks.

It’s been a hard 48 days, even without the world going to shambles around us, even without a new normal that requires gloves and a face mask and a bottle of hand sanitizer on the rare occasion I venture out of the house to brave the possibility of infection for groceries or medication. Even without the headlines proclaiming the rates of infection, begging us to flatten the curve, watching the death toll tick exponentially higher. It’s been a hard 48 days, to grieve three deaths in a world where death feels a little more familiar than she usually does for most people. A world where I can’t hug my siblings or my parents while I’m trying to work through the hurt.

Through it all, my words have been gone. When I was younger, I’d self-flagellate for not insisting I sit down in front of a blinking cursor and pound away on the keyboard until I’d met my arbitrary word-count and felt productive for the day. Now I know enough to know that sometimes, my sadness is so big it forces my words away and leaves behind a blank and empty slate. So instead, for the last 48 days, I’ve kept myself busy in other ways.

And with that preamble, here is the first distraction. I’ll have more coming over the next few weeks. Some of them may be words. Some of them might not. Either way, I’m here.

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Distraction I

I. Step outside, feel the tropical humidity like a living thing. It encircles me, envelops me, presses against my pores and slips inside my lungs. It pushes down, the weight familiar, like a body above mine and the resistance of mattress below. 

II. The thin cotton of my shirt clings to the small of my back, already soaked through. I tie the hem in an inelegant knot, sloppy but suitable, wicking up sweat as the fabric shifts. A cool breeze passing raises goosebumps, leaving me limned with salt and shivering slightly. 

III. I swipe a tendril of hair from my forehead, feel the grit of soil against my face before I kneel and the ground bites into my knees, reminding me who I am about to worship. I push my fingers into the heat of her, she sun-drunk and languid beneath my ministrations. I delve into the timid resistance of her topsoil before she gives way. I feel her part beneath me as I probe, gently, burrowing tunnels, creating careful lines that bloom into waiting rows. 

IV. I tap the hard edge of white envelopes against my palm and fill my lifelines with seeds: some smaller even than ants, indistinguishable from one another; some brilliant purple mottled with pink velvet, lush as a velvet midnight; some black as tarmac painted with bleached white lines that meet in V’s at the apex. 

V. The water sluices down the smooth rubber of the hose to drip, drip, drip from my fingertips. I want to lift the nozzle to my mouth to drink down the heady wine of water warmed by the heat of the setting sun. I want to dance, joyful, beneath the streaming river the same way the seeds do and lift my arms like brand new green leaves to the sky. I twist the spigot to tighten it when I’m done and push my toes into the soft grass for counterbalance from the hard metal.

VI. My fingernails are slivers of black crescent-moons; the porcelain pink of my skin is dark as a starless sky. I am painted black in stripes of soil filled with the promise of life bursting forth. I stand in the shower and watch the water interrupt the dirt pressed into the folds of my skin like lingering leftover kisses from a lover.