Coexistence: Stories

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

To be a mother is to represent for someone else life as an abstract quality.

A photograph represents the past without bringing it to life. A photograph gives shape to history; it allows us to fashion a landscape of feeling, suppressing whatever other emotional detail is ungovernable. A photograph is a ladder that goes backward in time, a ladder we can push away whenever we want. With photographs, we can obscure the past as much as illuminate it.

Does she have a use for her sadness, which feels so much like winter? Yes, because it’s also a homeland, a place where she is never in exile.

His death fractured her reality, made her feel lopsided and blurry. They were both overtaken by the blurriness of grief, just not in the same place. To grieve apart from one another is itself a tragedy.

Sometimes to remember is enough, she thinks, then she says it out loud.

“I thought about asking if I could draw you,” he says into the sunlight, squinting. I want to study him too. His hair is messy and long; it falls over his face as he speaks. His eyebrows are thick hyphens. He’s tall, broad-shouldered. His right leg shakes even when he’s sitting still. The total effect is that he seems to cleave into negative space, to subjugate it. I read somewhere that before colonization Crees were the tallest people on Earth. What are we now?

If I speak, my voice will waver. The instructor’s remarks are an existential blow. In a way, the elision reaffirms how ungrievable Indigenous suffering is in the course’s conceptual frame. My body protests, I’m shaking. Will sees that I’m rattled and presses his leg against mine, then rests his head on my shoulder. I take in the aroma of his shampoo—pomegranate. We are together in our minor grief. That he exists, that he and I constitute a “we,” however budding and unstable, is enough of a counter, today, to historical ignorance. We aren’t overdetermined by the instructor’s politics of forgetting.

It’s October, and the shorter days have made us hungrier, depriving us of light and forcing us to look for it in other people.

Will eventually falls asleep on my chest, and I run my hand through his hair. I resist tiredness. I want to extend the day for as long as I can. To sleep feels like a betrayal of living. So, I close my eyes and try to remember everything, which is also called dreaming.

The smell of meat and gravy and frybread fills the house. I think about my family, my mom. One day I’ll bring Will to my reserve too, I decide. I owe them a visit. In showing him my little corner of the boreal forest, I’ll show him my past, which is one of the most intimate acts available to anyone. I understand that he’s extending a precious vulnerability toward me.

After something else fixes the group’s attention, Will leans over and kisses me on the lips, longer than I expect given the relatives around us. I’m anxious at first, then I surrender to the gesture, relaxing, for the first time, into the publicness of our queer Cree joy.

That’s what love is—someone else’s spirit moving through you. When someone moves through you they leave behind a small trace of human life. It’s how we know we’re still alive.

Being Indigenous in the twenty-first century means that a single hour can be governed simultaneously by joy and sadness.

“Now, when I picture my day I picture you in it.”

We don’t need to say anything; we are tired and in love. I want to spend the whole night this way, but that would be impractical, as so much about love is. To be in a bathtub with another man feels like more than I deserve. I feel satisfied with the scale of my living, the small contours of my existence.

As he begins snoring again, I realize I know with total certainty that I love him. How? I will change my life for him, I will go wherever he goes.

To be a poet one had to believe in the coexistence of these kinds of contradictory truths.

One student said something that struck me, left me speechless: “A beautiful sentence is a reason to live. We write because we want to keep living.” It occurred to me that it had been months since I’d last written a poem.

I told him white men loved to turn me into a story without an ending. I was someone who just—

“It is vital to me that we defend this other notion of poetry so as to ensure poems aren’t simply a method of self-reflection but also tools for collective struggle.”

Lucy’s love opened space inside his mind for different memories. That was how love changed people: it made you want to give yourself over to new pasts, to future emotional histories. It made you ache to be alive.

The future is something I can breathe in. I can breathe in time like words, like complete sentences.

I wanted a house and a few acres so that my grief could have space to expand. If grief is compressed, if it has nowhere to go, it mutates. It was mutating inside me in Toronto. I didn’t know what to do with it rattling around inside me like I was pure negative space. I wanted to come back to deposit it in the world, put it down somewhere else, somewhere familiar.

Years later, while at the university, Paul reflected more deeply on this; he thought it was amazing that in order for a Cree sentence to make sense it had to be spoken as carefully as possible. What would the world look like if we all had to treat language with that much care? All he speaks is English, which is both blunt and ugly.

“I’m not ready to lose you.” Paul’s eyes water. He can’t see anything, except for Louise’s blurry outline. “I know, my boy.” Her voice is steady. “You don’t need to be.” She watches him wipe his eyes. “I hope heaven really does exist,” she says. Paul glances over at the portrait of Jesus above her, which is crooked. “I hope your dad is waiting for me.” She shuts her eyes.