It took me almost a year to be able to even write about it. I still don’t have the right words.
June 18th was the day the summer carved and cut from me, shredding and scattering and leaving the hollow.
The sun baked the edges and burned away still more. I poured out of my face and fell out of my throat and rotted in my own belly.
This was just the start.
Every waking began with the slivered edge of a remembrance of what was, followed fast by the rushing wailing of the remembrance of what was now. I was breaking and broken and crucially crumbling, wasting away in the tender part that knit us together, the part that was carved, the place that was cut, the pieces that were shredded and scattered, the hollow that remained, waiting, growing.
I crumpled around the absence and slid inside. The hollow took me.
I wept my way around the borders of this emptiness; I crawled in the dark of it, finding it ever expanding under my searching palms, my dirty knees, my bowed and broken head. In this way I mapped the shape of the place my sister had occupied in the person I was before she left. I often forgot where I was and thought I would find her there, even though there was the place of where she was not.
So I heaved and sobbed through a wretched and winding way, and in these crawling, sliding, elbow dragging travels I discovered what the hollow held.
There in the dark, wet cold, I did not find a straightforward grief, or frank loss, or blunt pain. It was nothing so simple or neat, not so clean or sane. Inside, instead, I found a living thing. I found an unwanted and strange creature, humming and fluttering along under my ribs. It has a name I love and a face I miss, but it is not her.
This creature is a beating and breathing mass of all that she was, and all I was with her, and all we were together. It murmurs what was left unsaid, and remembers what should never have been said. It shimmers with memories beautiful, and shudders under memories terrible. It teems with joys, with guilt, with questions; it dreams in misty, relentless ifs and cries out in sharp barks of why, why, why? It is frenetic and dangerous, full of teeth and grasping claws that mark me over and over again; it is smooth, docile curves where I can rest my head and hear the beating heart of what it meant to be and to have a sister.
In the hollow, beneath my ribs, sometimes it’s so small I can breathe around it, a moat of air and space that gives the illusion of distance. Sometimes I forget it is there and glance down to find its eyes on me, and then I have to discover it all over again through the infinite shock of knowing. Sometimes it’s wild and screaming and threatens to overtake me; sometimes it does, and then I’m in the hollow once more, in unfamiliar places I have yet to map this time, crawling again on searching palms and dirty knees, lost.
Sometimes, when it has been exceptionally tame and I am feeling especially brave, I make myself reach in the hollow and carefully cradle it in my hands. I make myself feel the pulsing, shifting shape of it, and softly stroke the finality of what it means to have such a creature inside of me. I feel the awful weight of it in my palms, the warm, weeping reality cupped there.
I’m washed in the insistence of the necessity of carrying it with me until I, too, am an unwanted and strange creature beating and breathing in the hollow under someone’s ribs.
Rare are these brave times, because the weight of the creature in my palm, even at its very smallest and kindest, leaves me exhausted- far more so than those first lost days of crawling, sliding, elbow dragging travels. At the bottom of everything, of course, such distinctions are pointless: whether cupped in my hand or curled in the hollow, I can never, and I will never, be apart from it in any way that truly relieves me. The geography of the body doesn’t allow for such distance. Our proximity is complete and final.
Most of the time, I can be neat and clean and sane, and allow it to live as I know it must live, to dream and scratch and breathe and beat and shimmer and shudder, to hum and flutter along somewhere under my ribs. Most of the time I can set my shoulders and move through the world even as it moves inside of me. Most of the time.
Still, in slipping moments I sometimes give in to the need to stand on the slivered edge of remembrance of what was. I shake my head at what is now. I try to fill in the space where I was carved and cut, but it pours out of me, the hollow repelling anything that tries to undo it. I try to gather the shredded and scattered, but it is forever lost. In this ritual I try to deny what is now, even as I know I cannot forget the crawling travels of the hollow, or ignore the unwanted and strange creature under my ribs.
Despite the hopelessness of it, I do so desperately wish that it hummed and fluttered anonymously.
Despite the hopelessness of it, I do so desperately wish that it did not take the name I love and wear the face I miss.
Despite the hopelessness of it, I do so desperately wish for the wholeness of June 17th.
Originally published May 26th, 2013, on Blogger. Written in remembrance of my sister, Heather Michelle Alden, who died June 18th, 2012.
