In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

I’ve always loved when the light finds the broken spots in the world and makes them beautiful.

We let ourselves forget the inevitability of things. I guess it makes us feel in control over our lives.

“Because for every way the world tries to kill us, it gives us a way to survive. You just gotta find it.” I take the long way home to try to slow the orbit of

Sometimes you get used to hurting, the way you acclimate to excessively cold or hot water, and then it’s the absence of it you notice.

He starts to say something and checks himself. Then he says, “Feels like God isn’t listening, you know?” I nod. “Felt that a lot.” “Thing is, I don’t know which I prefer. To think that God is real and ignores me or to think God’s not real at all.” He takes a deep breath through his nose. I’ve never seen Alex look so despondent. “I’ve heard people say God sometimes doesn’t answer prayers because he has a different plan for someone,” I say. “You believe it?” Alex’s dryer buzzes, and he opens it and starts unloading his clothes into a basket. “I don’t know, man.”

She tells me, “Sometimes God has to take a life apart before he can put it back together.” And I think how God’s been hard at work taking my life apart for all my life. I’m still waiting for the putting-back-together part.

I paddle us to where I promised Papaw that I would lay him to rest. We surrender him to the dark water like we’re loosing a flight of doves into the dusk. No elegy but our tears. I wish our love was enough to keep whole the people we love.

Some people can lift your heart up to the light, reading the truth of you written on it. I was afraid that being a man meant waging war on what’s beautiful. I wanted to love the world without taking anything from it. He knew all this. This is what you remember of the people you love when they’re gone—the ways they knew you that no one else did—even you. In that way, their passing is a death of a piece of yourself.

I guess you don’t get good at mourning. There are no grieving muscles you can train. You start over each time.

Now that I think a lot on words, I realize how poorly they represent absence. We should have a language of loss that we keep in a black-velvet-lined box and only get out when we most need it. Instead, we have: Dead Deceased Departed Disappeared Done Ended Expired Finished Gone Left Lost Passed Not one expresses the completeness of the idea it represents, the way apple represents the completeness of an apple and river represents the completeness of a river. They all leave something unsaid. They all have some phantom limb that reminds you of their lack. Don’t they know how much I loved him?