The Nature of Disappearing

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

It is something she does, identify one word to summarize a person—one solid, shiny word that really captures someone’s essence. Deep down she wants to believe that people are much more complicated than a single word, that perhaps a person doesn’t really have an essence at all, but rather essences. Or that maybe a person could be one thing, but then change. Even so, it’s a game she plays.

She knows all too well that even the people who seem to love you the most can leave you and move on as though you never existed.

THE THING IS to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, HOW CAN A BODY WITHSTAND THIS? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. —Ellen Bass