[ postcards from the week you haven't lived yet ]
The wardrobe smells like naphthalene and something under it. Cedar, maybe. Or just wood remembering damp.
You open both doors because one alone felt like prying.
Inventory, front bedroom closet, 9:40am:
- Winter coat, navy, moth-damaged at the left cuff
- Three wire hangers, empty
- One plastic hanger, the kind hotels let you take
- A scarf you do not recognize
- A scarf you do
- Shoes, low-heeled, tan, still shaped to her feet
- Taped to the inside of the left door: a manila envelope, unsealed
The tape is old but not brittle. It peels clean. She must have used good tape. She was like that — particular about adhesives, dismissive about most everything else.
Inside: seven postcards, rubber-banded.
Your handwriting.
Your handwriting, which you would know even if you'd gone blind in the interim, because you still cross your sevens the way she taught you before she stopped teaching you things.
Dated next month. Each one.
April 4. April 7. April 11. April 15. April 19. April 22. April 30.
You sit on the bedroom floor, which is parquet and cold, and you read them in order because disorder, right now, would be a cruelty you cannot afford.
April 4
Buy milk. The corner shop on Barrow Street still opens early. The woman behind the counter will not recognize you but she will say good morning like she means it. Let her. You are allowed to accept small things from strangers. You are allowed to accept them from anyone. Buy the milk. Put it in the fridge. The fridge will be empty and that is fine. One thing in an empty fridge is not sad. It is a beginning.
April 7
Answer the phone. It will be your aunt, or it will be the solicitor, or it will be someone trying to sell you something you don't need. Answer it anyway. The muscle of answering is what matters. You have not answered a call you didn't expect in — well. You know how long. Today, answer. If it is your aunt, let her talk about the weather. If it is the solicitor, write down what he says on the back of an envelope. If it is no one, say hello into the silence and hang up. Practice being reachable.
April 11
Open the curtains in the front room. Not because light is healing, or whatever they say. Open them because the fabric is dusty and the window behind them faces the street where she walked every morning for fourteen years and you will want to see what she saw. The elm on the corner may still be there. Or it may not. Either way, you will have looked.
You put the fourth card face-down on your knee.
Outside, a siren. Then quiet. Then a dog, far away, barking at the siren's ghost.
You turn it over.
April 15
Go to the river. There is a memorial on the south bank — you've seen it, or you will, a low stone wall with names. Her name is not on it. That doesn't matter. Sit on the bench across from it. Eat something. A sandwich. An apple. Anything that requires you to chew, to taste, to stay in the body that is yours, that she made, that you carried away from her and kept.
You don't have to forgive her today.
You don't have to forgive yourself today.
Just chew.
April 19
Wash one dish.
Not as metaphor. There is a cup in the drying rack that has been there since before she died. It has a chip on the rim that she never minded. Wash it. Dry it. Put it in the cupboard or put it in the box marked keep or put it in the box marked donate or hold it for a while and then decide. The deciding is not the point. The washing is the point. Warm water. Your hands in it.
April 22
I don't know what to tell you today. Something is supposed to go here. Some next instruction. But I'm writing this — you're writing this — and the words are not coming the way they came before, which is maybe what grief actually is: not the absence of the person but the absence of language adequate to the absence.
So: today, do nothing. Stay in the apartment. Let the silence be silence and not a thing you need to fill or fix or explain.
She was silent for ten years and you were silent back and between you there was a decade of quiet that was not peace but was not nothing, either. It was a held breath. Both of you, holding.
Today you can exhale.
The seventh card.
Your hand shakes, which surprises you, because you thought you were calm. The body is not interested in what you think.
April 30
Lock the apartment. Leave the key with the building manager, whose name is Elena, who will tell you your mother was a quiet woman and you will nod because what else is there to do with a description that is both true and not remotely enough.
Walk out. The street will be the street. The city will be the city. You will carry what you've kept and leave what you've left and neither list will be complete and that is the way of it.
You will think: I should have called.
You will think: She should have called.
Both of these are true and neither of them is the whole truth and you already know that, you've always known that, which is why the silence lasted as long as it did — because when both people are right there is nowhere for the conversation to go.
Buy groceries on the way home. The home that is yours, not hers. Fill the fridge. Not because a full fridge means you are okay.
Because you will be hungry.
Because hunger is the body's way of saying still, still, still.
You sit on the parquet floor for a long time.
The postcards are blank on the picture side — plain white, the kind you buy at a post office, the kind that aren't from anywhere.
Your handwriting. Her apartment. Dates that haven't happened.
You do not understand this. You will not understand this.
You put them back in the envelope. You do not tape the envelope back inside the wardrobe door.
You put it in your coat pocket, against your chest, where you will feel it shift when you walk.
Inventory, upon leaving:
- Envelope, seven postcards, unsealed
- The scarf you recognized
- The cup with the chip on the rim, unwashed
- A set of keys you will return to Elena
- A held breath, released
- A held breath, released again, because once was not enough