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Now his appetite has moved to his lungs, which are always starved for air. His breathing has the keening note of the wind blowing over something sharp. It’s always there, which means he has something sharp inside him. People can’t live long with sharp things in them. I understand this.
Some aren’t okay with not understanding everything. But I’m not afraid of a world filled with mystery. It’s why I can be best friends with Delaney Doyle.
“I’m happy here.” Sometimes Delaney looks at me like my skull is transparent and she can see the thoughts forming on my brain’s surface. “There are ghosts here,” she says quietly. There are indeed.
She pummeled me with facts about the science of drug addiction, talking like her mind was running from something.
“Because for every way the world tries to kill us, it gives us a way to survive. You just gotta find it.”
We’ve never been back. People from church don’t bring by casseroles when you leave like that. Still, he sits and waits for someone to talk to.
I’ve spent much of my life feeling unsafe, unsteady, and insecure. Sitting on Papaw’s porch with him was always my fortress against the world.
It breaks my heart how extraordinary he thinks I am. It’s worse than being ordinary.
Life has given me little reason to feel large, but I see no need to make myself feel smaller.
I inhale deeply. It feels gluttonous to do that around Papaw.
Falls right in your lap.” “That’s the problem. I don’t deserve this.”
“I need to be here,” I say. “ ’Cause I’ll live forever if you stay?”
“Death’s all around us. We live our whole lives in its shadow. It’ll do what it will. So we need to do what we will while we can.”
spent two hours in a tomb with my mama.
Behind each is that awful slack weight of death.
Delaney thinks if you could dilute down the smell of skunk by about a million, it would be the best-selling perfume on the planet. She thinks humans are secretly attracted to everything that repulses us.
Something in me flashed and went dark, the way a light bulb sometimes blows out in a bright burst when you turn it on.
class. I learned to take only the beatings I couldn’t prevent.
I smile, knowing I’ve walked right into Delaney’s trap. She always wins our debates.
“Let’s look up the definition in the dictionary.” “Waste of time, because either it’ll agree with me or it’ll be wrong.”
“Yeah, but not because I think it’s probably true.” “Then why?” “Because it’s heretical. That’s how science advances and takes humanity with it. People have to be brave enough to look stupid in a field where looking stupid is the worst thing
“I will. I promise,” she says quietly, no jest in her voice whatsoever—only the unshakable resolve of someone sworn to ride out and meet Death in battle. There’s no one I’d trust more to fight him.
Something begins happening to me. My concern for Mamaw of a few moments ago is swept into the rush of a crescendoing inside my chest. Something animal and ferocious, bleak and savage. It’s growing too big for my body, ready to rip through my skin. A roiling tumult of hatred and fury overcomes me, and a fog of black-and-gray static envelops my brain. I see Jason Cloud’s glittering, leering grin mocking me. My head throbs at the base of my skull.
Blake wouldn’t have let death make that decision for him.
“You’ll never regret a decision more than the one you make out of fear. Fear tells you to make your life small. Fear tells you to think small. Fear tells you to be small-hearted. Fear seeks to preserve itself, and the bigger you let your life and perspective and heart get, the less air you give fear to survive.”
She weeps. “I’m not gonna be alone?”
“I’ve started to think about my future for the first time.” “Yeah?” “I never let myself have dreams. Didn’t want to be disappointed.”
“Who knows where the future will take us,” she says through a deep yawn. I shake my head. One of these days, life is going to take us down separate paths. Just not yet.
Why me? Why me to be allowed to know this strange and remarkable girl and all that comes with her?
I’ve seen that life is filled with unimaginable horror. But it’s also threaded through with unimaginable wonder.
He sits in the front of the canoe, like I used to, with his oxygen tank. He doesn’t paddle. He’s not having that good a day. I sit in the back, the way he used to, and paddle for us both.
I ask Delaney what’s going to happen to her mama when she’s gone. She doesn’t say anything but gives me a slight shrug, then looks down and back up at me, like I already know. And I do.
But I’m still hungry for communion,
Carry off my fear like it’s sin. Fill my reservoir of courage. Cleanse me of doubt. Make me strong enough to cut myself a path through the world, like you. Remind me that there are things I love that can last. Goodbye.
This must be what it’s like to die. You look around you and see how much of what you love you leave behind.
“If you could know everyone who’s ever loved you, would you want to know?”
It’s exactly as I imagined: a place I could never imagine myself being.
Humans are pack animals, like wolves. We honor shows of strength.”
“I think of poetry lovers as people who love beautiful things.”
I’d thought about how funny it would be if when you got to heaven, God could give you a printout with all of your life’s vital statistics. How much hair you produced. How many colds you defeated. How many times you skinned your knees. How many nightmares you endured. How many pancakes you ate. Every brave thing you did. Every heartbreak you overcame. Everyone you mourned. Everyone you ever loved. Everyone who ever loved you.
From there you could make predictions and formulate hypotheses. The sort that help you survive life with an addict by bringing an underlying order to apparent chaos. Ones that’ll help you survive a place
Papaw told me that if I’m ever hanging out with a group, I should be the one to suggest getting ice cream, because it’ll always be a good time and it’ll be my doing.
Memory is a tether. Sometimes you get some slack in the line and you can play it out for a while. You forget and think you’re free. But you’ll always get to the end and realize it’s still there, binding you, reminding you of itself, reminding you that you belong to each other.
Fear tells you to make your life small. Don’t give it the air to survive.
“You can’t fix a car with poetry. Poetry won’t help you build that new app and make billions. It won’t win you an election. There are so many ways that poetry isn’t useful in the way we think of things as being useful. And yet…”
“We bring poems to read at weddings and funerals. We write them to lovers. When our lives have been burned down around us, we look for that single glowing ember remaining, and that’s a poem. Poetry is one of the highest artistic achievements of humankind. “I told you that there are many things that poetry won’t do. But there are many things poetry will do. Poetry makes arguments. It presents cases for better ways of living and seeing the world and those around us. It heals wounds. It opens our eyes to wonder and ugliness and beauty and brutality. Poetry can be the one light that lasts the
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I’m glad to have this bit of minor holiness all to myself.
I don’t expect it to last, so I chisel it into my mind to run my fingers over later.
“Mary Oliver—she’s one of the poets in your hand—said something important about writing poetry: ‘Just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate.’
Life often won’t freely give you moments of joy. Sometimes you have to wrench them away and cup them in your hands, to protect them from the wind and rain. Art is a pair of cupped hands. Poetry is a pair of cupped hands.”
