She said no one talks the way that you do, sees the way that you do, understands the things that are really going on. She said we are one-eyed people in the land of the blind, we are ignorant of time while others are enslaved by it, we are the people of hope, of compassion, of deeper truth and inner beauty. She said I never thought about those things that way before, never thought about animals, never thought about America, never thought about “I Am a Rock” in exactly those ways. And then she said forever.
It did not take long for her to say forever because it doesn’t when these things are true and right and no matter what you take away from me this lifetime, you will not remove the trueness or the rightness. You can tarnish anything you want, you can fill a thousand bags of sand with gleaming gems only to rot them at the bottom of the ocean or the core of the Earth and the glow of the shine that peeks through will still be bright enough to blot the moon, compete with the sun. There is a truth to creation and a falsehood to destruction that bleeds more profoundly than all the rust in this empty-seeming world, that keeps the heat of hope aflame neath the somber embers of salty extinction. Waiting for a little nibble of something flammable nearby so it can catch, take hold, flare up in lofty remembrance of what is inevitably lost.
I remember thinking that when it happened, when it truly happened for real, I would count things. The number of times a certain turn of phrase, a certain iteration of a feeling, a certain look or sensation passing to another passing into the eternity of commitment unending. But such is not the way of these things, the counts become unsustainable and seem superfluous, even remedial. Who could put a number on “I love you”s, a digit to discern the exchange of souls across an eyeway? The genus of the idea lodged in a prior love taken, the need for evidence mounted in the face of denial, but no matter. One loses sight of the safeguards on the way to the abyss, becomes resigned to happiness, commits fully to the immutability of inner peace as a lifelong condition. And somewhere in that drifty bliss comes the backslap of complacency, the gentle tilting of water that will eventually become a drowning whirlpool. All the while, feeling like life is too beautiful to count, too perfect to question.
Now she falls silent, at my own behest, the cacophony of criticisms too great to bear in the face of her own self-imposed blindness. It is impossible to lose so much, moreso in perhaps the most undignified way known to human relations, but it is the unkindest cut of all to have to carry the weight of continual disregard, endless apathy, a wanton will of callous indifference in the face of such once-loved suffering. The half-flat quarter-true platitudes plinking down the cross-continental airwaves, simplifications of philosophies and theories once embraced and now lampooned. The audacity to claim that I do not care about happiness just because I see something else as the most essential purpose of human being. The outrage of the line “I wish I missed you.” The insult of seeming to only care about suicidal feelings at their precipice, but not their genesis.
In the quieting of these rabid, more recent voices, perhaps there is a hope for the whispers of the past. That the person killed so violently on a night of unfaith can be resurrected if only in memory, in contrast to the radio silence I have demanded for my own sane hopes. There is danger in this method, to be sure, real threat of a spilling ever backwards into the vain twisters of a past never to be regained. But perhaps there can also be mourning, the dirges can finally be played against a backdrop of quiet instead of the din of denial, the thundering cymbals attempting to override a decade of true love.
Come softly now, hear the echoes of years gone by. A world rent asunder by the crashing of planes, now tied so poetically to the demise of the instigator. I could not have chosen these dates more carefully were I a scriptwriter, a managing editor on a turnkey timeline. And yes, the desire, burning bright, to call, to e-mail, to reach out across the unfeeling space and distance and share what was shared then, the alienation from the bloodthirsty others. The disconnect from those who could not see beyond themselves. How insidious fate to make me yearn for just those feelings on just this day from just that lost soul.
Emily, I miss you. I will always miss you. If there is a lesson of history, a lesson of 9/11, a lesson of love, it is that all this loss is so unnecessary. We are consigned in this life to be archeologists in the wreckage of our own waste. Picking at it, like disoriented ravens, in search of a faint glimmer on which to pray.
