(52) grief cycling (*TW: suicide)
it has been seven years of surviving Manel's death, and as certain as the seasons pass, leaves fall, snow melts, spring blooms, summer wanes, days turn to night, twice a year I feel his absence stronger in the air.
at first i can barely tell it is there. i hear it in the quiet. the static crackling, crisp in the air of dawn, my reptilian brain senses awakening. as the calendar gallops and dates loom larger — his birth, his death — the electricity intensifies to a constant hum, a magnetic pull, until it climaxes in a surge of force — only for it to lie dormant for the next seasons. and the cycle repeats.
i commemorate these dates. i memorialize them. it is no coincidence, although it felt like that at the time, that our wedding was on the birhday before his last. our anniversaries, forever tied. and his death marks a different birth, of a different life, of my salvation.
his death was buoy in the thunderous ocean of depression (that swallowed him whole, and destiny sought that i survived), something tangible and real and meaningful that i held on for dear life, and upon which i built my future. would i have survived anyways? i will never know. as it is, in death he became my redeemer, my personal messiah, who died in holocaust to an altar we despised, making a sacrifice that wasn't his to make. and so i cherish and nurture the gaping hole of absence that is his premature departure, and that changed the course of our lives in such profound ways.
for seven years now i have lived like this. a period of full body cellular renovation. and my soul couldn't be more different.
i know it's me. i still look for him in every corner, his face in every crowd, his voice in every choir. the solemn incantation of my lips, whispering febrile lament to the hereafter, his name on a loop manelmanelmanelmanel, weaving a silver strand between worlds. but i see nothing, i hear nothing, only my gasps for air.
and yet
and yet
and yet nothing is random, or is it the energy that i subconsciously push out into the world that gains traction, and things related to him always come back during this time.
just last week, m's dog died. the dog he loved so much and yet was not enough to keep him (i repeat the mantra if love could have saved him he wouldn't be dead, if love could have saved him he wouldn't be dead, but then isn't love enough isn't love enough isn't love enough??). the dog he loved so much he used the leash to bind his life and seal his fate. (i see it as proof that it wasn't a choice, it couldn't have been). the dog we all loved on and in whose eyes we looked into, searching, searching, for a remainder of him to still be nuzzled in the neck folds, a bit of him to be shared in the scratches behind her ears, the wet of her muzzle a portal between worlds.
it's the things that come to mind that make me want to call him, still. his number is long gone from the predialled numbers on my phone, erased from the favorites, and his address rarely comes up as a suggestion in the autocomplete options of my inbox. the muscle memory of texting him is gone. but something happens, politically, personally, and what am i supposed to do? in times like these, it feels like every week something happens that makes me want to call him. that urge didn't die.
and then, yesterday, it was my father who brought him to life. he was trying to describe a young man that appeared recently in his life and made an impression on him, and when i asked him to tell me more my father hesitated on the phone. and he then said that this person reminded him of manel, his peaceful energy, his serene presence, his tranquility. that he was a very discreet but extremely attentive person, with a detail oriented mind. and as my father was describing him, it was as if m was there with me. i asked for more and more details, and even suggested that my sister should meet him, maybe date him — my desperation, ravenous — as if the fact that this person shared common traits with m made him suitable to be in our lives in a more permanent fashion, as if i could resurrect a bit of m through this person, the enlivenment of his qualities, breathing sleeping blood flowing on a living person. never m.
i could hear myself speaking, pupils engorged, the agitated thump of my heart racing. the absurdity of it struck me, hard. this urgent, pleading, childish reverie of something that will never be again.
i thought it'd be better by now, and it astonishes me that i've kept going. seven years, and part of me is still rythmic, providing posthumous cpr on an incorporeal effigy of him, pumping imaginary blood externally, keeping track of the pushes "1...2...3... 1...2...3..."
another part of me lies prostated in holy adoration, forever caressing the sandals that he slipped from his feet before his final leap, the eternal flight, in the doorway where he took his life. his body suspended, swaying, his shadow still, (still) casting Shadows over me (today)
yet another part of me, long gone, died with him that cursed night. waiting (for what?) at the door of his flat, praying (to Whom?) at the head of his coffin, in his wake, at the foot of his coffin, in the funeral, fat tears splattering heavily on the cross, the wooden lid between us. to hell with the renmants of sweet innocence, shreds of puerile hope that i held on to in spite of bitternees and afflictions, billowing, gone, suspended in the air, burnt away to nothing with his cremation. ashes, ashes, raining down, loitering the earth with soot. his death, the final dellusionment of my life.
i wonder what he would make of this. the trauma we carry, the pathological grief, the magical thinking, the enshrinement of his demise, the both living and inanimmate memento mori i collect and piece together to make a gory frankenstein to his liking (or one that closely resembles the bastardized image i have of him). our mourning is now as old as our living friendship will ever be. my memory fails me often, in spite of my best and most desperate efforts. i wonder if i would recognize him at all.
slowly, we empty our garage storage of the collections of painstakingly kept records and books we salvaged from his flat. now knowing for sure that they are not useful, to us or anyone. the collector is long dead. the lighters we took from his weed drawer, that we still use to light our nightly cigarrettes, are almost ending. today i looked at our keychains and realized they are still his. but as j's is broken, one day too mine will break, and eventually they will be thrown out. the physical traces of his life and presence fade out from ours, thrown with the trash, burnt to cinders.
if he came now, and for him time had stood still, would he strike me as petulant and childish, now that i am older than he ever was? if he didn't die, what would our relationship look like today? what would his life be like? how would he interact with his friends' kids, with a? would he have gotten married? would he have kids of his own? what would he do for work? who would he vote for?
these are all questions that still circle my mind during times like these, when the world feels crazy and everything is spinning too fast, and i hold on to my memory and pain and grief as anchors, the only places where i know quiet. and it feels like m is oh there just there, beyond the veil, and i can almost feel him, smell him, hear him, trace him with my fingertips in my mind's eye.
f.