Later, in her apartment, years later, we’d sat together at her low wood table and had coffee.
The sunshine had streamed in, filtered through the plants she’d trained up the glass, which warmed in the light, and let the brightness through, so that it lit the metal sink to a blur behind her head.
We’d spoken about grief…
A friend of mine had died within the year; his brain had been eaten away, and I’d held his arm while he lay on life support, and shouted his name, just belted it, at the top of my lungs, so that the whole fucking ICU could hear me, my voice bouncing off the vinyl curtains and hospital tiles, resolving into soft beeps of an EKG and the sound of perfectly closing elevator doors in the polished corridor; all this because I’d had to get it out, because if he’d died without my shouting, I’d never have forgiven myself for not trying to call him back. I had to. I knew it was insane, but couldn’t help it.
Sailor poured me more coffee and said that all anxiety, all anger, reduced to grief. She suggested the anger I felt was there because I thought he’d been unfairly taken, a thought I had before I realized any battle with the gods was a fixed match…
As if a man, tiny pea of a thing, could swing his microscopic fists at a Nebula, and achieve something more than an angry dance.
I’d wanted to kill after he died.
And there was no aggressor whose death would avenge him…only the targetless ether.
He was dead, and I’d become furious, but abstracted, spinning, trancelike, like a dervish.
I told her that grief really is some form of narcissism. My drama couldn’t possibly have been about him…he’d already gone.
As I explained this to Sailor she took down her hair and put it back up again, adjusting the little band in the back. Then she turned toward the window, and asked me whether she should draw the blinds, whether it was too bright. I told her no, it was okay.
Later, after the sun passed, and the room was cool and dim, I said that I thought no, everything didn’t reduce to grief. Grief, in its purest form, I’d told her, is floating. It’s a kind of light-headedness, a feeling of suspension, of dizziness, almost. It’s a loss of weight, as if one’s blood could grow thinner, lighter, as if one’s body could undergo some sort of alchemy, a kind of refining, a way of turning into air, the only way of approaching the realm of spirit.
Narc in the Maze 