Space
We are drifting, and with that admission the anger grows and festers and lingers, clawing to smother the grief, struggling after rage to forget the loss.
I fought so long against losing, but that battle is only the fight against admission. You can’t hold on to people. It’s taken me so long to realize that. Persephone would have been taken from Demeter eventually — there’s no getting around that. Not by death, maybe, but love and violence and the drift, the space between people that grows steadily but unobtrusively, the way the universe expands — atom by atom, until suddenly gravity fails, gravity betrays us and baffled antimatter occupies a once-human space.
Such melodrama over a moment. But it is never a moment. There is no moment to pinpoint, no instance to seize from the aether and accuse, entreat, refuse. The drift just happens. Imperceptible, but irreversible. Irredeemable.
This is what it means to be people in time: we cannot escape from the past, but we cannot hold on to our present, because what we think of as now, the things of which we are aware, are already past. As soon as we can see something it is behind us. Who said that? No immortal — they were slaves to their passions instead, because Time could not govern them. Neither Kronos nor Dike nor the Erinyes could hold the Olympians. Maybe Nemesis — but she appears only after the commission of a crime.
What manner of people conceives of such gods?
Recollection
Flipping through her scrapbooks and albums, I am shocked to see us smiling so much. It must have been another lifetime. Other people. I cannot imagine that there was a time when we smiled so much and so easily. Laughter was as comfortable and habitual as the furniture, a fixture we settled into without a second thought.
I am not exaggerating. I am not idealizing a time so longed for it has been forgotten. Our grief occurred in proportion to our joy then. For every crushing defeat there was another moment of impossible levity. The one sounded the depths of the other. They were inextricable — I would not have my roses without thorns — but balanced.
And now, suddenly, we smile less and less often, even just with each other — my best friend, the sister I never had — those smiles seem mustered and wistful. We are smiling to remind each other how to smile. We are smiling to assuage the realization that a shared past does not ensure a shared future. We are smiling to say goodbye.
Somehow laughter got away from us. But something less than grief — creeping resignation — is assuming its place. As though feeling has become too much, as though nothing can ameliorate this weary acceptance. We smiled wanly, and our paths diverged, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else to say. Just stunned silence, and the memory of shared laughter, withering into something more than grief, and less than goodbye.
