Remember that Sunday we walked on water
The oxygen in the room had gone out. His breath faltered for hours, and it seemed like his lungs had learned an entirely new language of stuttering non-words and gasps—starting, stopping, starting. I sat by his bed and told myself that if I stayed still long enough, that if I collapsed into myself and became small enough, then there would be more space for the air to circle back, to come around and find its way back to him.
Wind in the wild is easily captured. It gets caught in my hair without my consent. Uninvited, it enters the pockets of my oversized coat (the tan one, with the fruit embroidered on it), making it swell outwards. It beats against my chest like an external heartbeat. They say horses can hear the human heart from four feet away, and that the wild ones synchronize their heartbeats with the others in the herd.
- And his heart, tired, slept.
- The herd stills. I don’t think my heart has ever been this quiet.
- Look, I say, look, we are all the wild horses.
Someday I’ll tell him that during the first few nights he lay sleeping, massively drugged and plugged into a tangle of artificial tethers, I touched the back of his forearm constantly. His skin was a canopy stretched loosely over the bones of a beached shipwreck. It was the most heartbreaking thing in my miniature world of heartbreaks. But I know that memory fades, just like this one will.
In five.
Four.
Three.
Two days before, it was Eid. One day before, I was unwell. I had reminded myself again to not down the painkillers with wine because the last time I did, it was a real trip. We were, both of us, hollow bodies, containing some sort of affliction. My pain was in the past. His was in the present. None of the agonies inside us were designed to collide. And yet, here we were.
- When his eyes opened for a few precious seconds, they were wide and clear, but empty.
- Like the lights were out.
- Like nobody was home. (But please, come back again tomorrow. Knock gently. Tread softly.)
I can’t pray because I don’t. It doesn’t domesticate my terror, not in the way Kurt Vonnegut described how Anne Sexton’s poetry does the job for him. Besides, all the prayers have been outsourced at this point. Prayer allows the community that we hold dear to do their own share of the heavy lifting. Their faith is a thousand tiny paper cranes folded for him, poised for flight. I keep nothing for myself.
But I do keep a few things to myself. Like the two weeks of almost-grief, now waiting in the wings for future loss, inevitable and absolute as we slowly capitulate to time. Like those photographs that could’ve told another story had the days turned out differently. Like the exact moment that every child goes through when they realize that the sea isn't the worst place to drown in.
- During that summer in the ‘80s, he drove our beat-up Volkswagen country buggy to the beach.
- He showed me how to tread water. I was in primary school and I had never heard of it.
- What does that mean, Dad? Tread? It means to walk, sort of. But. But? You aren’t going anywhere doing it like that.
No, I suppose. Not yet.