May Flowers
A starling lost a lover. Its other half spent its last days inside of our house, scratching and clawing for a way out. "Why didn't you ever chirp?" I wanted to whisper to it, as if those words would help me swoop in and let it free as it lay panicked in the maw of a hidden attic I never knew existed in the first place. I mean, maybe the exterminator could've came a day sooner. Or maybe we could've noticed the hole on top of our roof at any point in the last decade or so -- but maybes have never resurrected flesh and bone.
Gus (the friendly exterminator) showed us a picture of its partner waiting solemnly on the roof for its dead mate. "He'll keep calling for her until she stops responding. Eventually he'll get the hint and fly away in three days." Symbolic in a way, but I've never sprouted wings.
Instead, my body now inadvertently jolts and jerks from anxiety, and the grays in my beard have been blossoming like a field of flowers in spring. In March, my grandpa fell down for the seventh and final time in his house. Not because he passed away, he's met a fate worse than that - the quiet brutality of aging frayed the wires of his mind while his body simultaneously gave up on him. Off you go - and all of your life’s savings too.
I tried to brace some of the impact for him, being on alert 24/7, gauging the acoustics of his falls while praying to a God I've often ignored that he would be okay. I prayed for his pain to stop, and I prayed for his pain to end. My tinnitus rung like bells on the end of a jester's hat, changing faces as I entered his room, sometimes with levity as to not freak him out, other times swift and surgical, banking on my adrenaline to help lift a grown man with wet pajamas from fetal position back into bed. I'm treading lightly in a house that isn't quite mine now, trying to reconcile the fact that I couldn't stop him from becoming his own worst nightmare.
Time really is a cruel curmudgeon wielding a camouflaged scythe - slow-moving but wholly intent on expediting until the last table is served. It will sell this house in due time. It will blanket the late night conversations I've had with my grandmother while sneaking her chocolates. (PS, we saved your Christmas cactus from dying! I forgot to water it amidst the chaos.) The rooms will be painted over. Different smells will be wafting around the kitchen. The new family's children will have to learn which steps creak the loudest to avoid drawing their parents' ire. Perhaps they'll fix the gate in the backyard and the fireplace will actually be put to use. I'd love to bury a relic of us in a nook somewhere in the house just to leave a poking message: "You can't get rid of us that easily!"
This month comes to a close like an arrow to the heart. I'm ruminating on the spoils of success, and why it's always been so elusive in my own life. Why these words have often stagnated in my own hands, dead on arrival. I'm realizing how contentment and happiness is a starved tiger in a cage that I've locked myself in, and how perfection is nothing without a little scuff and gunk. My tears came pouring in waves by a mirror forced in front of a face that looked quite foreign. Against my own wishes, I come to see myself - a jester in a house, a starling on a roof, a cactus in soil, a writer only in name, watering everything but myself.
