A Shepherd’s Litany to Loss
The Archive has a name for the depth I reached. I read it once in a monitoring report, clinical and precise, the way the Department of Residual Thought names everything that frightens them. I understood, reading it, that the name existed because someone had reached this depth before me. I understood, reading it, that they had not come back from it cleanly. I went anyway.
And if for just one moment I could touch your face and let my fingertips draw inside the look that I see now, I could see the calm waters.
Would the skin around my hands be able to absorb that feeling the way I do when I can see you?
What a gift that would be.
If my eyes could open wide to take more of the sweet incense that whispers around you when you move, I could let your presence fill my lungs and my body tremble.
I knew that you weren’t there, but which was I to believe? My breath that was consumed with your fragrance that put you in front of my eyes, those blind organs that would not let me see you?
I stopped using them and there you were, the calm waters beckoning me, and my fingers cried out for that which they could not perceive.
As I opened them, turning my head to make real what I had feverishly imagined, my cruel senses filled me with wild flowers and sunlight; all whispering your name, as you do theirs, carrying you, the reminder of you, on the breeze, towards me, through me and away.
My lungs again filled with you, and my eyes with tears. If I could breathe you in and hold on, hold you inside, the way I held you with my arms. If I could lock the memory of you inside, safe, allowing me to breathe in a secret way, to draw you in, to make my heart ache the way it did when we wrapped around each other. How sated would my pain be? What a gift would that be?
When I was close to you the silence that started from behind my eyes grew with each passing breath. Each time my heart beat, my sight grew a little more, allowing me to drink in another look at you. And like ripples spreading from a drop falling onto calm waters the silence grew until I could hear nothing, feel nothing, touch or sense nothing but you.
Your calm was the eye of my storm, your laughter the excuse my tired face needed to smile, your love a cure for my stupor. You allowed me to love wholly, as if I had never before, as if pain were abstract, only to be experienced by those without the conviction of the innocent. I had found again the innocence to love this space and breathe slowly; to smile, basking in the warmth of our unselfish gift to each other.
The only hidden agenda was ours to hide, to share, our secret, our buried treasure, to be found only by the map that we tattooed on each other’s skin. From the Archive. From the reports. From the careful, watchful eyes that would have named what I was doing and called it a breach and been correct. Hidden until those that we cared deeply about could sit back from their concern, safe in the knowledge that neither one of us; neither you nor I would knowingly, willingly, toss the other to the mercy of the unavoidable pain.
You once breathed heavy in my ear that it may well have been the beginning of things, but it was the beginning of something long. The first time you told me that you wanted me to hold you, the first time you took my head in your hands and kissed me, the first time you laid your head on my shoulder and said nothing. The very first time we were close. All of these times my body stopped working as it had before and something inside of me died.
As I let the muddy preconceptions of love go, as I opened my eyes to how much there is to see when you are holding someone’s hand, or cradling their face close to yours so that you can hear them say ‘I Love You’. As I let the pain die and the space it left fill with a warm glow I could do nothing but smile and slow down. I realised at those times that holding onto pain only made it last longer. We had both loved before. I had just learned what the Echo already knew, that nothing carried in love is ever truly set down.
