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grief is always the same. a sunset sky pillowed with gray clouds, the light pushing through in a few places. always the shortness of breath and temper in the weeks after death. in the weeks death becomes permanent. the shadow against which life leans, darkening the light to bittersweetness.

the moment of impact occurs, orbits into the past, reoccurs and remembers itself. as if a vital organ is removed, a limb amputated, a man castrated, one color segregated from another; a form shattered by an arbitrary force.

. . .

sometimes the worlds eclipse, and the places where we met–to eat, to walk together, to talk about the listening, to laugh–make your presence so real. the corner with a bus stop bench where i saw you after work one day last june, and it was my turn to pay for lunch. i walk across the street from that corner five days a week now, because i still work there. it’s october of the same year and you’ve been dead for three and a half weeks.

when the pieces of the heart fall away, the underpinnings become visible. what kind of structure has built itself in that tender, enclosed space? what underlies the exterior, the living red that is designed to shatter and reinvent itself?

the doctor told me to expect either diarrhea or unstoppable tears the weekend after treatment. she said i was reliving the moment of impact, the instant i found out about your death, the experience of those seconds, the first hours in which it was confirmed, your name checked against the report made by the town’s coroner.

my lover and i gathered your eyeglasses, sneakers, phone and drove them to the coroner’s office to be joined with the rest of you there, in a fridge somewhere behind the generators at the back of the building. M., my lover, told me to try not to think about that, but the coroner said that your body was “unviewable”–it was easy, then, to know that you had been destroyed. by the impact. shattered to pieces by the force of a freeway car at six a.m., long before traffic slows to stop-and-go.

it was still dark when you left. by the time my alarm crowed at six, you were gone, your car out of sight where it had been parked outside. the front doors of the house were unlocked, the television on loud. you and your purse had disappeared. i thought you had driven home, not onto the freeway onramp a mile away, not pulled over and left your new car on the shoulder, not stood between the lanes without your shoes and glasses and waited for a fast-moving car, not stepped in front of it.

not died at twenty-three.

it is the places i remember being with you, the reality and gravity of your flesh, my spirit leaning against the vibrations of your voice, where i cross into the moments you were here. in the days after your death, i see myself where you were, waiting for death to claim you by force. using the car as a bullet, an actual gun became unnecessary. which parts of you remained after the first shattering? did the cells know to expect that sudden dispersion? did you feel the ones that followed? my cells imagine they are yours, over and over again, stretching themselves to recreate the moment you were taken away.

you told me you wore green on purpose that day, the day you had asked to meet again. our meeting turned to evening and you stayed the night, silent in the next room.

. . .

before retiring after midnight, i slice cucumbers for my swollen eyes, the bags of water that have collected beneath each one. unsightly patches of red mark the tears that scratched my face today, when remembrance of you became inescapable. any tasks i could complete, even if i could accomplish much in this halted state, cannot re-member those ruptured cells and limbs, cannot gather the blood that flowed away into a stain on a gasoline-streaked highway.

the clouds move, the light shifts as sunset nears dusk. gold shafts of sunlight break, and are broken by, the blanket of gray heading north. twilight paints colors that mirror dawn, marking the time of Maghreb prayer, and a new moon rises.

© 2009 tahminah zaman