Mourning Sickness

I loved you.

I loved you in the way that the poets would call into madness, full of words like 'gossamer' and 'limpid'. I loved you unrealistically. I was utterly yours since birth. You were my favorite fever dream.

I loved the golden blond hair like corn silk and sky blue eyes that stormed alongside the weather - I could even love your darkness, and your moods. Your temperament and your temperature, and how you left the kitchen window open in the blistering cold of winters so you could hear the silent sound that snow makes.

I had never heard the loudness of silence until that first winter together.

I loved your silence, your coldness, too. The way you would retreat to your model airplanes, when the world was either too much, or not enough. I loved the way you put things together, and the way you left them to fall apart.

"It's the circle of life," you surmised with a smile when I would bring to you the wings of an injured 747, flightless, as the 27 birds in our kitchen screamed in glorious jealousy. I wanted 27. I wanted that number.

But you didn't fix those broken planes. You didn't believe in fixing things.

Until the day that you got your diagnosis. I held your flightless hands and we crawled out of that office together.

"Inoperable. Potentially terminal."

I couldn't breathe. My lungs hurt for you, crackling obscenities I squeezed into your palm. You were my fortune.

I loved you so much, I even loved your sickness.

You made a pitstop that day on the way home. You walked into the store and walked out, pockets full of feathers and Crazy Glue, promising yourself sane.

That window stayed open as you fixed those airplanes, one by one gluing back their wings and giving them the gift of flight once more. They hung everywhere in our home, testaments to the life divine. Testaments to your treatment. The infection that creeped its way into your marrow. The lonely and haunted barn owl that lived in the trees outside poked her head through our open window, looking for a reprieve from the snow. She sung a song, a hollowed warning - she was a bringer of death and you paid her no mind. You worked on piecing yourself back together.

I couldn't hold it together after you were gone. I picked up every feather strayed, and built wings you would have been proud to wear - crows, gulls, owls, chickadees, and more. Every I could, I would, I built to you. The world turned off after you left.

I left the window open. All 27 of our birds screamed a wordless song, one for each year I spent without you. 27 years that didn't exist until you. I woke up, born 27, knowing you. All I heard was you. You were the silence and you were the snow. I kept the window open.

I opened their cages, desperate for relief, and I set those birds free. I knew they would die out there, and I thought that I would in here. All I wanted was the stillness of your memory.

And that damned owl - she peered her head inside, and she turned me sideways with her curiosity.

I once read somebody proclaim the phrase - 'it is easier to revere you in absentia', and I don't think I prepared myself for the depths of both absence and reverence. That mourning, like banks of snow, blankets out the noise of everything around it. Sadness turns us into the epitome of silence. There is a perfect state of nothingness achieved by the stillness of missing one another. Where everything ceases to exist momentarily.

A black hole of emptiness, the utter ending - where everything can begin again.

"Man dies in pieces. First his heart, brain, and yet the part of his body responsible for procreation - his sperm - does not die for twenty-four hours afterwards. So yes. You can make a baby from a dead man."

Death. Death is the circle jerk of life. Once you're spent, what's to become of your remains? What happens behind hospital doors will go to your grave and to mine. What good is loss without antithesis?

Destruction without the opportunity for creation?

How better to immortalize your death, than to bring forth life from it?

To really understand one, you have to know its contrast in full intimacy. In the immediacy of my grief, mourning you physically was really my only option - a grand act of liberating a memorial progeny, one I felt would truly preserve you.

A sickened kick hits me, and I quickly retreat to the kitchen sink - full of feathers and egg shells - and spill my guts into our garburator. The beginnings of you are inside of me once more. It's gentle, it's enough to replicate you. The owl opens her mouth to sing her deaths-song again, and I scream to quiet her. I shut the window.

I'm not losing you twice.