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What ever happened to every action causing a reaction? Every force creating an equal and opposing force? Surely if this were the case the universe should be imploding right about now. She couldn’t imagine why she wasn’t dodging bits of sky. How could someone be so completely gone without an affect? Nothing to let anyone know they’d ever been at all. No change to the world. No void. She’d have thought there would at least have been a void. She would have coped much better if there had been a void. She’d have liked to step out her front door to see a big gaping tear in the sky, a cold, black nothingness that sent a chill through the clear day, an irreconcilable emptiness. Not this indifference, not people walking hurriedly past checking their watches as they went, not newspapers headlining the latest tabloid sleaze about some politician or other’s fall from grace, not birds singing away and flowers in bloom. Everything was so out of keeping with the tragedy, she felt like going out and purchasing some sort of nineteenth century mourning gown complete with blackened gloves and a veil. Something that would show the magnitude of her loss. Some drama fitting of the occasion. Perhaps she should just fall to the ground and refuse to get up; perhaps that would best marry her feelings with this insensitive bright and breezeless day; perhaps that would silence this apathetic street into the quiet respect he deserved. But then again, perhaps not. This was London after all. She had seen the passers-by step over shrouded bodies before; careful not to scuff their well heeled shoes; careful not to lose their precious minutes. How could they relate to her loss with such a distorted mentality? How could she expect the pitiful to pity? Her world had been ripped apart and it was testament to their inconsideration that the aforementioned sky was still perfectly intact.
She had been prepared for his death; that had come as no surprise, it was the lack of an impact that she was left mourning for and if she were honest a rather selfish dismay at the futility of life. I mean, apparently, that was it, just an empty urn; that was all there was left, ashes, pieces of body and bone that had once made up a person, reduced to mere dust, barely captured on the wind for a second before rapidly dispersing to nothing, gone without a trace, as if he had never even existed at all. Life, existence, it had seemed so important, a game even, a bit of a lark, but now she had seen how men could be broken to powder and that image, that terrible image of someone vanishing, her loss played out so literally before her eyes, not so much the final nail on the coffin as the sudden pale into insignificance. The whole thing had rather put her off cremation – it seemed so reductionist; so clinical; so wholly inorganic – she had always wanted to burn bright against the dying of the light, to fly on the wind, to pass through this world to the next carried swiftly along on a current of air – burial had seemed so archaic, so gross; all rotting bodies and worms, all vacant eye sockets and decomposing flesh, all slight chance that she would not in fact be dead and would spend her last days scratching splinters until her muffled cries were no more, but now it somehow seemed rather nice, earthy, real, a link in the chain of life, a fitting contribution to the ecosystem, nutrients passed on to feed the soil, to in turn feed the plants to give some foraging creature a nourishing bit of green. What good did powder and dust ever do to anyone, and what of all the energy used in that cold incineration, fossil fuels, global warming, how apt that even in death we screw the world of its resources, one final act of earthly inconsideration.
She had once heard that Buddhists have their dead bodies cut up into little pieces and scattered across the sands of the deserts for the birds of prey to feed upon; compassionate and giving to the last. She had been rather impressed with this snippet of information but most everyone she had told had wrinkled their nose in disgust or looked at her funny so she had stopped bringing it up as interesting trivia altogether – nevertheless she was in great admiration of the concept and whilst not really something she could put in her will, if only for the sake of her grieving loved ones, she was all for it. You’re dead after all; dead, deaded, diddly dodo squat, nana, nienta, done, dusted, dormant, definitely, decidedly dead. What difference did it make but to the starving birdies, a positive out of a negative, not really such a waste – although she realised this was unlikely to console her loved ones and not entirely plausible because just who would cut her up? Not a nice job – so not an option, actually. But one that seemed far superior to this wispy wasteful dust scenario. Wormfood it was then.
She had had enough of crying now, she had cried in every which way that tears could fall: Loud, heaving sobs, choking coughs, boo-ing and hoo-ing, panicked gasps, old-fashioned weeping accompanied by little whimpering sniffs that Jane Austen herself would have been proud of. Mostly her days had been spent just getting on with menial tasks whilst silent tears incongruously ran down her cheeks leaving tracks as they rapidly slid across her face; like tiny snails on skis. She had produced so much salt water over the last few days that she kept checking her finger tips to see if they had turned prune-like. How did the body maintain the tears, what reserves were being drained? She could only imagine. She had a thing about crying; she hated it, hated herself for doing it, felt weak, pathetic, indulgent. Tears made her angry, she loathed their wastefulness, they did nothing to resolve the problem apart from pointedly highlighting one’s inability to hold it together, they were stupid and ineffective and that was precisely how they made her feel. He had always said that she was mindlessly optimistic; it was one of those affectionate criticisms that were secretly compliments in disguise. He had dished it out whenever her logic had managed yet again to turn coal into diamonds. It was a skill of hers, one that had no place for tears, crying only signaled defeat, the mine would be flooded and all the coal would be washed away in a sooty sludge. On the rare occasion that the floodgates opened she would berate and ridicule herself with vicious accusations and uncharacteristic intolerance. This had made all the crying doubly stressful and the more she had mentally slapped herself the harder the tears had fallen until her cheek skin stung; until she had reached the point of exhaustion and near hyperventilation. Where was he to ask ‘what’s happened to the mindless optimism?’ where was he to remind her that nothing was ever that bad – and that if she just put her tinted vision to it life would come up roses. But that was just it. How could anything ever seem trivial again, even with pink lenses the wreaths of lilies were still unmistakably white and ashes were only to ashes, she could not magic them to gold dust, not anymore.
Grieve; it sounded so bleak didn’t it – like an empty grey evening, like some scummy watery soup, like a club foot dragging uselessly along a gravel road - hauled by the body like an afterthought. He had said he didn’t want her to grieve for him, he had seemed so hopelessly assured that those words alone could make her suffering null and void, that they would stamp out any pain in an instant and allow her to press on with her life that she could only return his sincere request with a pathetic muttered “ ‘kay”. Grief was even worse, word-wise, what was that misleading pentax ‘if’ doing involved; giving the misconception that there was some hope left. And whilst on the subject ‘mourning’ also seemed totally inappropriate. Nothing like morning, though audibly synonymous, nothing reminiscent of the breaking day, bright sunshine, blackbirds speaking, first birds, nothing to give praise for, nothing new. It seemed an insult to adopt such a similar word for such a wholly dissimilar thing. Words. She thought far too much about words, she mused on them for hours, she went through favourite words like some people went through fashion; some cool sounding word not used nearly enough would capture her fancy and she’d make a special effort to weasel it into her vocabulary, to tailor the conversation towards an appropriate juncture for her to insert it seamlessly into and there it would sit making her feel better just by its specific sound satisfyingly spoken aloud. Eloquence was a dying art and nothing in her eyes gained higher respect than a carefully placed adjective or two. Her favourite kind of people were those with their own unique style of speaking, catchphrase queens, kings too but they were less common – usually the queens had it done; the mouthy girls and bitchy gays bringing the world to life; choosing their words carefully with instant effect generously feeding the malnourished language with parfait or poison. They were the true rulers; in this quiescent age of quickspeak, where efficiency sanctioned the butchering of beauty with buzzwords. Had there ever been an uglier concept than structuring a word for business and brevity, amalgamated from clumsy pieces of other words, like stripping the bleeding innards from once graceful creatures grotesquely torn apart and merged to feed the hungry consumers on low-grade reconstituted spam. Those who could still command their language, those saviours of silence surfing their symphony across a sea of sentence-starved subordinates shone like shooting stars against a silent sky.
He had been good with words, moreover he had appreciated words, measured them, felt their weight, she – a frivolous wordster, had sometimes been in awe of that. He never used words for the sake of it, he had used them well, and her words, her way of speaking had amused and not confused – he had got it, and now he had gone. No one left to whom she could just talk without re-editing her raw thought process, no one who wouldn’t think she was just trying to appear clever, intellectually superior, better than them – no one who knew that with her colloquialisms were the true contrivances, that she was dummed down because she knew people did not relish this one woman revival of the dictionarial dead, endangered, in danger indeed of being lost, forgotten, unuttered, she knew they did not find each lexical relic rare and exciting as she did but saw them as a threat, something they weren’t entirely familiar with and thus something not to be trusted. It was hard not to come off as a bit of a prat, a shameless show-off, a big I am, and so it was that no one heard her thoughts verbatim, it was all translated into colourless twaddle and, apart from her favourite words which could not help but escape her, all thought was toned down and boarded up by the tuneless tombstone of the tongue.
No one understood her grief because no one had understood their relationship. In fact the whole situation was under a pretty thick cloud of misunderstanding and people could not signal the way out to her because they weren’t sure which direction she was coming from. His parents had struggled to find words for her at the funeral, there was an awkwardness, a difficulty in placing her role in their sons life, a lingering mistrust of the girl that had first been their son’s wayward sixteen year old friend of piercings and day-glo hair, the girl who they heard had posed nude for a sixth-form student’s still life photography project, the girl with the reputation; who their son had stayed up all night for in a casualty waiting room after she had been hospitalised for drink, the girl who had been thrown out of clubs for dancing on table tops, the girl they had warned their son against going traveling with, the girl who had taken their son halfway around the world regardless and in their eyes seduced, their son’s first girlfriend, a two year distraction from his university studies, and then perhaps more alarmingly the girl who after an effortless and seemingly emotionless breakup had maintained contact, and whatsmore cultivated a pervading mutual fondness, that was quite frankly entirely unfitting of a exgirlfriend/boyfriend relationship. Whenever she stayed over at his parents house she felt slightly uncomfortable as if they assumed their house rules, and indeed their son’s morals, were being violated. Though they were undoubtedly unaware of the terminology it was clear to her that his parents had added one and one and come up with fuck-buddies. This had made the funeral awkward. All his family were there, some of whom had met her as the girlfriend years before, they squinted at her face trying to make out a faint memory, and there were others, people she had never met before; distant relatives who had never really known him, random cousins, next door neighbours, yet somehow she had felt like the one that shouldn’t have been there. She had excused away her validity by describing herself as just a friend. But she was not. At the table amongst his friends, most of whom were hers too, she had felt entirely at odds. Everyone seemed to be studying her intently, asking her how she was, smiling sympathetically. She could sense whispered concerns; the girls exchanged furtive glances whenever she joined a conversation, the boys raised their eyebrows at one another and did that guy thing of rearranging ties and shifting uncomfortably on their feet. It wasn’t just his relatives that didn’t get it; the same uneasiness, the same awkwardness seemed to drain everyone’s condolences, nobody here knew how to react to her because nobody could figure out what he had meant to her. She could find solace in neither camp, she wished that she could just vaporise into particles and go and sit in the urn beside him. She would be perfectly happy in there talking about how weird this all was, pontificating on life and love and what it all meant through the countless nights with him forevermore. She felt quite certain that put to the test they would never run out of conversation. Except they had. He had. His conversation had been prematurely stifled, and in a funny way, so had hers. She was floating in a senseless universe; there was nothing to keep her grounded for her world had lost its centre of gravity. Her soul mates soul had moved on, and who could say where that left her. In limbo like Heaney’s fishes; suspended in immortal brine. Misplaced and unfortunate as chunks of dolphin meat in date stamped cans of processed tuna. She was beyond the point of salvation. Fates net had been cast.
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