Bodies of Light

by Jennifer Down

the idea of making fun of yourself before anyone else can do it, or giving yourself a name to take the power out of it when it’s between someone else’s teeth.

thought about how much we carry with us, and how things like smells and sounds can become normal or not-normal without us noticing, and how our memory gets papered over, and how violently we tear a hole in it when things come rushing back.

How Coral’s goodness, the simple kindnesses she performed without expectation of reciprocity, made me miss a mother I did not remember. How I wanted a parent, and how Coral could never be mine, no matter how many times she insisted we were family. How things were the best they’d ever been, but there was something decaying inside of me, or maybe a part that was never there to begin with.

some ways, it was almost a relief: not that Angus was gone, but that the worst thing had happened. I didn’t have to wait for it anymore.

Something shameful in the soonness, like we’d hurried through the appropriate mourning period. But it was as if everyone around us had been holding their breath, waiting for this precisely: a replacement, a distraction, something to plug the dreadful grief. We became a normal couple again, instead of people in recovery. Just like that, we were permitted happiness.

tried to bargain with these souvenirs. I would greet them when I was alone. It doesn’t work that way, of course. Not remembering is not the same thing as forgetting.

try to be firm with my emotions, and to keep my life as simple and small as possible. For years I only wanted something to put my back up against, but now I am trying to be my own spine. I used to think I could outrun time but now I am just trying to live through it. There were times, early on, when being invisible made me feel wild in the heart, desperately sad, loopy, starving, cracked, broken, but now I am secure in the knowledge of who knows me. Tony