The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

and I’m thinking, too, about how this, my first love of losing myself in the scaffolds and percussives of an unparsed lyric doomed me for life to never be able to hear, actually hear, the words to any songs, even in English, even my favorites, like Jamila’s, which I put on when I’m adrift and sunken and just need to feel at home in something—even those harbors are built, mostly, of sonics— not gibberish, I mean, but language so sacred it’s not my place to try to decipher it, phonemes holy as stones on a string, mysterious as the names we give to animals, or words we know only in prayer—at Rebecca’s mother’s funeral, for example, where, when invited, I added my small voice to the reciting of the Kaddish, and the perfect thunder of it lifted one part of me higher than air, while rooting another deep into the fragrant earth, a bit of which I later scooped, as gently as I could bear, onto the casket, the shovel heavier than any word I knew, and more full of light than even the birds overhead, who, as we wept, kept, of course, right on saying exactly whatever they needed to say.