Everything You’ve Lost Is Waiting for You

This isn’t the story I meant to write

Photo by Philipp Deus on Unsplash

It starts with a death, and goes downhill from there

The story I wanted to tell could begin there, outside the stone church where a small crowd had gathered. Inside, a wooden box held the cold bones of a woman I loved, a woman I still love, already shedding weight, already devoid of heat. The cosmos claiming it all back, one atom, one photon, after another. And outside, me, shaking dry hands with dry eyes under a dry undying sky.

I knew then, as I knew very well now, that nothing gets lost. The cards are shuffled, but never burned. Some piece of her might already be sinking into the trunk of a tree or catching like a stray shard of glass in the eye of a passing pigeon. Very lyrical, very lovely. But what use is that kind of eternity when we want the particular?

Nothing was more certain then, just as nothing is more certain now, that the unique assortment of atoms that formed her eyes and heart and tongue would never again recombine in just the right formula to return her smile or her laughter or her voice to me.

That’s the story I wanted to tell. But stories are tricky things. They twist under your hands, muscular pythons and muddy brown swampwater combining to trip you up, to catch you out, to bite…