From. To. Alive. Dead.

Two days before, there were flowers. Valentine’s Day. February. They were delivered to our home in the middle of the afternoon.

I open the door. A short, bald man with a red-gummed smile pushes a dried bouquet toward me and a whoosh of cold winter air follows it inside. I say thank you. I close the door.

Preserved pastel-pink roses, copper feather grass, white asters, brown kraft paper.

I was here with your flowers and you were out there in the big world. Isn’t that funny, to look back on, now? I put them in a vase and marvelled over never needing to water them.

You came home, later. Yeasty, breathy, hint of beer.

They’re dried? You asked me.

They’re dried. I said. (Did you already know, then?)

Everlasting, I said back. They live forever.

God. What a silly thing to say.

You were quiet.

Then, there is death. It is final and cruel, like no other proceeding it. I know this because you had cried. The heaving of your chest and the harsh bend of your shoulders was desperate. I had not been aware that a chasm was opening up between us. I’d been walking over the bridge I’d built for months, unaware that the wood boards were slowly rotting, some cracked.

Though I have practiced this kind of dying many times before; though I have flirted with it and sometimes wished the bridge to buckle and give in to gravity, this time is different.

I do not grieve you, exactly. Who are you? I realize I do not know. I grieve Me. Her, She, Who I believed I was presently, Who I felt I was just shaping up to be. The life I thought I held.

All of those layered origin stories I kept to myself that felt special and rare — the turning of the head at the last moment so a first kiss landed on a lip and not a cheek. Laughing through stuttered vows while holding each other’s trembling hands, the taxidermied mammals sitting on the shelf in the dining room of the officiant. Him standing between us, reading from a piece of paper spat out of an inkjet moments earlier. A soft house cat curling around an ankle, an aging wife with grey hair moving around their kitchen in the back of the home. The sound of a whistling kettle and the clang of a metal tea tin opening and closing. I do.

Our shared past, my present, their future. I look back at everything when you tell me it was for nothing. How could it be? I’d handed over all I had it seemed, but at what point? I had hoped it was worth something. Our death, this death, my death, their death, traded in for your life. It was worth fourteen minutes of time.

The clock reads 4:17. The big yellow school bus hums to a stop outside the front window. I wipe my damp face, strain a smile, say hello to the children. I ask them about their day. A small, closed fist has pummeled itself against my throat. I swallow, it suspends itself in my esophagus.

A flood has come. It washes over everything: the black couches, the wooden desk, your blue jacket, my white Keds. Our shared pair of silver tweezers, the ones we keep in the top bathroom drawer, floats on top of the rising water. Interesting. The flow carries me away, too. As if I am nothing but a speck of dirt. Nothing but a dust mote. One antenna of an ant.

I do surprise myself — my head stays upright. It is in my counted breaths: in an out, in and out, in and out, that I locate a rhythm.

There is a poem sent that talks of water. Glasses half-empty and waiting to be filled, a patience for the pour, then deep gulps of drinking from it when the time is right. How? How could you pay any mind at all to the glass of another?

Dry as an old bone. With all the driving to and fro, grocery lists, dates and numbers, teacher phone calls, remembering the birthdays, the anniversaries, stirring a pot, clacking away on the keyboard for work. The tap had not been turned on in quite some time. My glass, if you’d looked closely, had fine hairline cracks running down one side. Yours did too. But we kept them around. We placed them back into the cupboard again and again, but we did not ever drink from them.

It was just then I had realized: this whole time, you’d been outside swinging the garden house around. You had been watering the dry dirt and hoping for a sprout.

I find a leg. Just one. I rise on its gnarled joint, powered by the imagined cadence of her laugh. I am sent a taunting cake that I wish to throw at the kitchen wall. Stupid little bitch. Snakes for hair.

I do not know you any longer, I do not know this woman. You are both real (slowly calcifying bones, dimpled flesh, rancid sweat, sour breath) and false (how do their lips meet when they kiss?)

Medusa was a mortal woman who had served Athena, so the old story goes. Seduced and raped by Poseidon in Athena’s own temple, Athena reacts by punishing Medusa for the perceived defilement of her sacred space. I mean, never mind the rape and all.

Poseidon is not punished. Athena transforms Medusa into a monster, her hair replaced by hissing snakes. Now a creature, men who looked directly into Medusa’s eyes would be turned to stone. Eventually, Medusa was exiled to a solitary island where she lived in isolation and her only companion was loneliness.

Also the snakes, I suppose?

Does it mean something different now when you hear it, that story? This is what I ask myself. Does it make it worse, or better?

I both hate her and feel pity for her. She has hurt to come. And since she has asked for it — come, it will.

March is falling. I tumble into a pit that is black and full of oil. Despair lives here, wails escape my open mouth at night. I cling to anything that feels like a hand, yet when I reach up, I feel wrong for it. There is much debate between the metronome of right and wrong, freedom and selfishness. I do not know how to be an untethered person. I do not know how to receive. I feel I am about to be in trouble, but for what? I don’t know how to live here.

It’s funny, really. For all my worn out words turned over and over, the whispered complaining. God. Counting forward from the number of times I had stretched out my own calves to prepare for my freedom run, I find that I do not actually know how to use my feet.

Weight melts. Clumps of hair circle the shower drain. Strange, how I feel no physical pain. Strange, how those afternoon headaches are gone, the stiffness in the lower back, the dull ache in the curved knot at the base of my neck.

The dentist’s office calls to remind me of my missed appointment. The one scheduled for the day after, the one you said you’d come along to. My tooth is fine now, I say. It has miraculously healed itself. I think, I say, it was holding onto everything. It was absorbing it.

I learn that I am to be blamed. When one leaves, people want to know about Her. The new Her, not the old one. What does she give that your old love did not contain? What did your wife do, or not do, or say, or not say, or touch, or not touch, to make you stray? They salivate at the juicy details. Look closely, you can catch the drool shining in the corner of their mouth. Their sick curiosity is provoked, you have awakened their innermost fears. People love to hold a betrayal at arm’s length and examine it.

It would never happen to them. And if it did, they would be different.

After all is said and done, we are both meeting up with her in secret. Across the cafe table, I see my lips and my teeth but they are on her face. I ask the questions: when did it start? How did it end?

What I really want to ask is: How could you? Are you aware now, how it will live with you forever? Why did you commit such violence? How did it feel to break everything that was both mine and yours? Are you proud? How do you accept it? You, pressing your thumb down on the spine of another mother. How bad do you feel, now? How stupid and small? How silly?

When I embrace her for a goodbye, I do imagine that this is what she felt like when you held her. I am embarrassed by the thought — how a brain works, how it fires off such bizarre connections. Her frame is flighty. Bird-like, stiff, cold.

My warm arms wrapped around her shoulders. Thank you, I say. Fuck you, I whisper. She is unaware that my both of my hands twitch over her shoulder blades, wishing to close around her neck.

I can see now why we both settled for what was difficult. Why you ran around the track, circling with someone dead. You say, I was not running to something, I was running away.

I’m running hot water over a dish. I am pushing the vacuum cleaner over the crumbs on the kitchen tile. I am washing my hair. This is when I whisper to myself, “away from… away to…”. I weigh both ideas against one another. Discerning which is heaviest. Which is more right.

From. To. Alive. Dead.

No, there’s not much to say between us these days. There is only touch. A new language. Words are too hard, too dangerous.

The flowers outside are blooming, the rooster crows. When you come back home from an afternoon drive down Hwy 60, you’ve got a thick bouquet under your arm.

I want to do this more. That’s what you say.

This time, the flowers are alive.