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.

When I think of those days, of losing the people I’ve loved, I think of how my loneliness deepened, like being lowered into a well, water rising around me as I clawed at the stone walls, reaching for sunlight. How you get used to being at the bottom of a well. How you wouldn’t recognize a rope if it was thrown down to you.

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, too, had longed to face Jacob and hold him accountable. To speak what I knew was true and make him hear it.

“I keep thinking grief feels like climbing a staircase while looking down,” she said. “You won’t forget where you’ve been, but you’ve got to keep rising. It all gets farther away, but it’s all still there. And you’ve only got one way to go and you don’t really want to go on rising, but you’ve got to. And that tightness in your chest doesn’t go away, but you somehow go on breathing that thinner, higher air. It’s like you grow a third lung. Like you’ve somehow gotten bigger when you thought you were only broken.”

We had survived, but there was no celebration or spirited gratitude, only a shaken core, the question that lingered unspoken: yes, we’d made it through the storm, but will we make it through the calm after the storm? Which I knew was worse. All those days after the floods were always more difficult than the floods themselves. The rebuilding was what shook you to your marrow.

The world will break you, but it’s when you break yourself that you feel you really can’t heal.”

I blinked furiously so the tears wouldn’t spill. I wanted to reach out and grasp her hand, but I stayed still. 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.

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

When the water buried the earth, it felt like it was erasing us. The whole world a grave. But we would rise with the horizon if it continued to rise; we’d mark the sky with our silhouette before disappearing over the edge of the earth.

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.