we were laying on the floor, every blanket we owned spread out beneath us, a fire burning at our feet. a movie was playing and I was flipping through cookbooks. my hair was down, spilling over the pages, snaking down my back in tendrils. I made hot chocolate, spilled scotch on the kitchen counter, let stella curl into my side. and while we lied there on the living room floor, the feeling finally went away, finally just let me go.

the feeling …not sadness, not anger. not any feeling that has a name. the nameless feeling that cuts at the center of your being, dead thorns and broken glass. it’s heavy, this feeling…deep and cold and heavy. it’s suddenly opening your eyes and finding yourself in a swamp. and you dont know how you got there and you dont know where you came from…but you look behind you in the distance and you see a stand of black trees that pierce the sky and call your name. but those trees, they scare you, and you don’t know why. you don’t want to breathe their air, to fall into their shade…and you never want them to find you. so you face the swamp you’re standing in with the vague notion that you shouldn’t be here, that this is somehow all wrong. but there’s something coming, something pulsing at the faintest edges of your subconscious mind that pushes you forward. the water is black in the swamp and it’s deep, deep and cold and heavy. you’re stuck now, trudging through the water, clawing at the roots of trees, trying to get out because there are terrible things below the surface of that water and you can’t see them. and the swamp…the swamp knows you’re there when you shouldn’t be.

and you’re lost and confused and the panic starts somewhere deep, spiraling up through your chest in ropes.

and you don’t know where you’re going.

or where you’ve been.

or how you got there.

but something’s coming for you up out of that water.

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i’m sitting there and all I want is to go to her, to grab onto her hand until my knuckles bleed white. she’s not a foot away, quiet in her casket…go to her. but you can’t go to her, not now and not ever again because now…now you don’t even exist in the same world. chasms and black light and entire fucking universes are separating you now and you will never find her. she’s not for you, not anymore, and your entire perception of reality is cracked and broken.

and i’m sitting there, i’m sitting there and that tiny voice inside your head, it’s back and it’s holding me still, whispering words that dissolve away the lucid thoughts, eat at your sanity until there’s nothing left but the irrational screaming…all the things that don’t make sense and you know they don’t make sense…but that tiny voice is a steady drip of liquid poison right into your mind.

i’m sitting there and all I can think is that she can’t breathe, she can’t breathe in there and it’s dark, it’s so dark, and if you bury her she won’t be able to get out. she won’t be able to get out. please, listen to me, she can’t breathe, she can’t breathe and she can’t see in there…and what is she supposed to do. how is she supposed to get out?

i’m sitting there, sitting in complete silence and I can’t say anything, nothing…because what do you do when all these tear streaked faces tell you you’re crazy…that you’re completely fucking insane…?

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she’s gone.

you could have told me the exact day, the exact second I would lose her. I could have anticipated it my entire life, counting down to the last minute with her…and still, when the time came it would have caught me off guard, alone and crying on the bathroom floor, struggling to keep composure.

we went to see her. she was sleeping…frail, drifting. I called to her, curled my hand into her palm, pleaded with her to please wake up. “I’m here,” I said, “Nana, I’m here.” She didn’t open her eyes, floating in a morphine haze somewhere I couldn’t reach her. I stood there, watched her, tried to match my heartbeat, my breathing, to the rise and fall of her chest. B held onto me, quietly, with his head tucked into my neck, his eyes never leaving her. I tried again…and again…and again. And as I went to leave, Brigsby cried out and her eyes opened. “How pretty.”

“Nana, I love you.”

“How pretty.”

And Brigsby laughed, he grabbed her hand, he tried to kiss her.

“Nana…I love you…”

“How pretty.”

and her eyes closed

and the tears came

“Nana, please, I love you”

“…how pretty…”

and a nurse came in, slipped her morphine…

and she drifted off back to the place where we first found her, safe and dreaming.

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