borb watching

go back and tell it

by Bronwen Wallace

That we take so long to trust even the most necessary facts, our lack of power, for one thing, or the body’s patience in teaching us to die. That we keep on thinking there’s a limit that will make things simple for us, a once-and-for-all. I’m done with that, my friend says of her divorce, I’ve worked it out. She believes she can live in the present like that. We all do.

The summer before Pat died there was a night at my place when a bat got in on us. It wouldn’t stop swooping round and round the room. I had to kill it. And afterwards, I wanted to stop every crack in the building, got tape and a step-ladder, half-crazy, trying to patch out chaos, Pat on the couch refusing to help, already knowing that it wouldn’t.

I keep looking for a way round this, an escape, a worst, but even my dreams are houses only birds find fit to live in, walls shift and the roof sinks through dust and wings.

The cries falling back to earth are thin as the day they bring, another one that won’t protect me any more from what I don’t want to believe: how every reckoning’s a private, ragged thing that rises, in the seasons of its need, like Pat’s breathing, on her last night, tearing from the air the only silence that would fit her, perfect as her face, which I will never see again.

Sorrow wears itself a hollow, cleans me out with its crying, a bare voice like that weather our bones warn us about. At first I thought it was malevolent, something that wouldn’t leave, but now I know it is no different from the light that washes in and brings me my body back, an opening that finds the people I love, still here, yawning as they shrug the day on, matter-of-fact as always, all of us a little puzzled by our need for each other;

or the way Carolyn takes my hand in the middle of a walk, laughing, as if it were nothing, this gentleness we learn from what we can’t heal.

“You are worrying too much,” Ilya said. “Easy for you to say,” Shane muttered, unable to hold it back. “Your mom hasn’t been texting all week with stressful details about this damn camp.” “No,” Ilya said. “She has not.” Another vibration from his phone, ‘Mom’ appearing on the screen, and then—Your mom hasn’t been texting all week. “Ilya,” Shane breathed. He pushed his laptop away and stood from the chair, approaching Ilya cautiously. “Ilya, I shouldn’t have said that.”

Or,