A Map of Silence

The map begins with a door no one will open again.

They told me where the room sat in the world: second floor, west-facing, a window that insisted on being bright. The coordinates don't help. A map is supposed to offer orientation; this one is inaugurated in pain and vertigo. The metal on the bedside glints like a semi-colon in a sentence that won't resolve. The air remembers her perfume, but it's been poisoned by the scent of copper and decomposition. Her wrist held to the bedframe created the peak of the mountain of our pain, frozen in place by the glittering cuff that pretends to be a cliffside.

I press my palm to the paper map, and it keeps its whiteness. Here, the legend has nothing left to say.

Every map gives us a scale. Mine is measured in seconds that could have kept her here. Five to text her first. Ten to call her and see if she needed me. Thirty to beg her to stay. The distances are small enough to be survivable, and yet, I never knew that any of those bridges needed to be crossed.

It turns out, regret isn't the mountain to climb, but loose sand drawing me down to sink. If I tilt the paper just right, I can see the faint lines underneath; the routes I had imagined, routes I had postponed, routes that could never become the paved roads for us to wander down, drunk and singing to the moon. A cartographer would call them palimpsests. I call them almosts.

The map features a river. It runs through the chest and floods the mouth with the ocean's salt. It widens at night, a surging tide that echoes when the house is quiet and every object becomes an echo. Chairs hum with the weight they'll never hold. The hallway learns to become a cavernous tunnel. In the kitchen, I can no longer turn on the overhead light, because it is a pale moon that refuses to pull back the tides. The longer the tides of grief rush forward, the longer the landscape erodes.

At the center of the page is a room I never entered, but I cannot stop describing. I walk the perimeter with a fingertip, careful not to disturb the soul that holds the silence inside. The handcuffs hang from the railing, empty now, each one a mirrored crescent moon, parentheses around a vanished phrase. The bed is a continent of interrupted breath. Light is a figure at the window, undecided if it's worth entering the space. If the map were colored, this is the room where the cartographer put the ink away.

-

There is a brother on the map, and he is the weather system. He blows in with a bag of stories and storms the house. He tells me of the line he drew and the way he lifted it, mixing her ashes with her favorite amphetamine. He needed to breathe her in, carrying her in his lungs because the lungs would remember more faithfully than a fading photograph. This is how a ritual enters the atlas: not as doctrine, but as a weather system. Unsanctioned. Recurring. Impossible to predict. He scattered the rest of her in the place where the dead are still singing, where everything is sequined and louder than law. I picture the highways lined with amplifiers, a nighttime roadway that never tricks you with morning.

I mark the coordinates of everything that I never got to say. The times I heard her voice, and didn't recognize the plea. The nights when we spoke around the impasse, and not through it. Silence looks like blank space on the map, but blank isn't really empty. It is a field of mines and fossils and unmarked graves. It holds what we couldn't risk naming. This is the only region I will color in. Graphite rubbed until it shines, a dark so full of our restraint that it glitters.

-

If you look closely, you can see the contour lines from where grief rearranged my typography. A ridge along the jaw from clenching. A valley in the sternum where sleep pools and evaporates without ever wetting the ground. scar tissue from when my heart broke, and I carved my pain into my skin, shaped like a country that refuses to learn my language. On certain dates, the elevation shoots upward, and I must acclimate all over again. Altitude sickness masquerades as memory; I chew slowly, and forget to swallow.

I lost north early. The compass I carry prefers questions. Why becomes a wind that never settles. I try to plant my feet in the field in the storm. The field is suspicion, and the storm is in my marrow. When I can't find direction, I reach for the closest moorings: a lit window of a bar, a laugh at the patio, the artist painting a mural, the warmth that comes from my sleeping child's head when curled into bed. I fold these spaces into the corners of the map, the domestic altars that keep the paper from curling. If the map can't tell me where to go, it can at least lead my hands to where they can rest.

I name what I can. Not to own it, but to endow it with meaning and direction. The avenue where we smoked cigarettes, leaned against the cold brick. The corner of a stage where she danced and sang, tequila held high above her head as though waiting to be blessed by the gods. The bar stool that became her shrine. The highway exit we took to beg the mountains for peace. I try to speak these names out loud and the syllables are lost in the weather patterns behind my teeth. Even so, the mouth remembers the route. You can forget the lines of a face, but still recall the way a name shaped your breathing.

-

At the bottom of the map, I leave room for a legend and write nothing. Sometimes the only honest key is absence. The measure is the silence that is expanding like freezing water to fit what cannot be calibrated anymore. If it seems evasive, forgive me; I am trying to be exact in a language that asks for clean borders while being built over a gaping fault line.

What the map does not show is the moment before her door opens. Everything could be reversed, because nothing was confirmed as being done. What the map shows is the traceable routes to the places where life continues. This isn't necessarily hope: it's a soft directive. Water will flow downhill, people will flow to each other when there is light enough to guide them. When I can, I follow the blue line to where the river becomes a mouth, and the mouth becomes her song, and the song, stubbornly, begs Stay.

I refold the paper along its old creases and tuck it away in my chest. Later, I'll take it out again, and it will have changed. Coastlines will shift, a few new marks I don't remember making. Grief is migratory: it builds and abandons cities with equal devotion and indifference. But there is, at last, a small square in the corner labeled Room. It has a window and a chair. It faces whatever direction the day is willing to offer. When I sit, the metal on the bedside stays cool, and the parentheses stay open. There is a space for them between the sentence I am not ready to finish, which is, for now, a kind of life.