The Act of Disappearing

by Nathan Gower

Myra’s warm body is a buoy in my sea of grief.

I enter into a prayer—one not uttered in words, but through my pulsing fingers and thrumming heart.

“You keep it. I’ve had it all to myself for over fifty years. It’s time to share that burden.”

People couldn’t feel the depth of the blackness inside her. Sure, they could feel sadness, of course they could. But what they felt had a bottom to it, something to stop you from falling into the full well of the thing. A bottom meant you didn’t have to try to claw yourself back up against the slippery walls.

A Limerick for Principal Tucker Here’s a gift from the whole senior class, One no future prank will surpass. To find “Donkey Four” Just close your own door And there you will see the last jackass!

I am WEAK

“People create the truth they want to believe,” he said. “The magician just helps them to see that truth.”

Jack Chandler was the quiet part of her soul—the only person in this wide world who she could sit with for hours without saying a single word, more comfortable in his silence than she even was in her own.

“but every once in a while you see something truly magical—something that turns you inside out, some beautiful thing that reminds you: this cruel and lonely life is worth living.”

Sometimes you can just be with a person, nuzzling into the comfortable silence of shared space.

They seemed to think of God as some white-bearded king sitting on a throne, sifting through the ticker tape of men’s complaints. But the God she believed in was made manifest in refractions of a rain puddle, the speckled-red burst of a tiger lily, the crunch of fallen magnolia leaves—in the voices she heard when she was alone and the world went quiet.

If God was real, She wasn’t some great something ruling from the clouds; She was the every little thing in this painful and beautiful struggle of life.

We all speak the language of our own lonely grief.

The little things are the only things, she remembered.

After a while, I notice broad cycles in her writing—lightness into dark, joy into sadness—a pendulum swinging over the course of days or weeks. Even on the happy days, there seems to be an underlying sorrow—something so familiar to my own life that sometimes it feels as if I’m reading my own thoughts.

The story will be real and imagined, history and myth. But I suppose that’s what all writers do. We don’t tell the facts; we tell the truth.

I’ll make sense of the world the only way I know how: I’ll write a story.