After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

It wasn’t just the loss of a thing that was a burden but the loss even of desiring it. We should at least get to keep our desire, I thought.

The rain had stopped briefly, and we all gathered at the window, hungry to see sky without clouds. A rainbow stretched behind our neighbor’s house and into the dark sky, and then it faded, just as quickly as it appeared. And I’d thought then how each moment snaps shut, faster than the shutter of a camera.

I knew it was sometimes easier to love ghosts than the people who were around you. Ghosts could be perfect, frozen beyond time, beyond reality, the crystal form they’d never been before, the person you needed them to be.

I thought of how birth is only the beginning of giving life, maybe the smallest part of giving life, like a seed that still needs the sun and soil, needs so much to still blossom.

This is how the water takes us.

There were no maps for any of this. Only people who had gone before, leaving trail markers behind for the rest of us.

From the water we came and to the water we will return, our lungs always hungering for air, but our hearts beating like waves.

Grandfather’s face had startled me before he passed. It was so full of trust, a gentle easing into another place. Like Pearl’s face after she was born, as she lay heavy lidded and drowsy, her body warm with that before world of where she’d been and where she’d return. Maybe we all were born with trust and then lost it. Maybe we all had to find it again before we left.

A knowledge that some choices are places and some places are where you cannot live.

What did it mean to enter an era without marked graves?

Nothing out in the world ever changed it being your choice. Hope would never come knocking on your door. You had to claw your way toward it, rip it out of the cracks of your loss where it poked out like some weed, and cling to it.

She was mine and she also wasn’t. She was wholly her own. And our memories bound us as tightly as our bodies before her birth. Her spirit would remain like a fire in my bones.

I am not the shards of a broken glass, but the water let loose from it. The uncontainable thing that will not shatter and stay broken.