Missing
While listening to a grief podcast, I clean out the refrigerator at my parents’ house.
The first problem is: why do so many of the words to depict grief sound so lovely?
Keen, wail. weep. Bereavement.
I’ve already overused these words. I’ve been inexplicably and wastefully drawn to them for years.
As if now I don’t want to crawl out of my own skin, everything prickly and hesitant, as if a pair of hands doesn’t keep catching and catching in my hair.
Missing
My mother is a fish, Vardaman repeats, in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, as his family builds his dying mother’s coffin. My favorite novel in college. It comes back now. On the beach on my pink bike wearing my mother’s too tight bathing suit I ride as fast as I can past dead fish after dead fish, choked by the algae. Deprived of oxygen, they must have thrown their bodies gasping on the sand. Like my mother, I think, unable to breathe, dying, and then am aghast at my own terrible metaphor, which she would hate. If I waded out in the water, color of rust, color of blood, if I let the water close over my head, would that lessen the distance between us?
