Just Float

This is for Hen.

This is not the time to write, I know, but I have so much much-ness pouring out of me and I don’t know what else to do. 

I would call him, I tried to call him, but that didn’t work because he is somewhere I can’t yet reach and so I will try to reach him with these words on a screen too bright and not bright enough all at once.  

He used to say that we were tethered to each other. If one of us was on a sea of sadness and longing (his favorite word), the other was sure to be there too, treading water just inches away.  

Where is he now?  

I walked around my house looking for him in rooms he won’t ever sit in.  

Maybe he left something for me, I scream-wailed to my scream-wailing sister on the phone, maybe he left a secret here somewhere.  

He didn’t leave a secret. 

He left a song, though. 

I found a song he wrote.

I’m always grieving, 

Lost in nostalgia, 

Following my mind is just a painful reminder 

I played it over the birds who were chirping too happily and the lyrics clawed at my heart and ripped sobs from my throat.

Let's turn this into something beautiful 

Is it loneliness or art 

Both can exist within my heart 

I'd rather work like a machine 

I’ve been held by so many people and it’s only been 24 hours. 

I’ve been held by so many people and none of them are him. 

The last text he sent me: “Can we do this: ‘they retreated to a cabin in the heart of the Catskills Mountains in upstate New York, owned by another musician friend Bryce David Dessner (from the band the National). Here, in bucolic paradise, the pair would have fires, eat and watch films, which they would then write about the next day.’” 

Yes, I said to him. Yes.  

We spent a day on a train and in the woods. 

He looked up at the trees and I looked at him. 

I was always looking at him.

Now I’m looking for him. 

We had all these plans. 

What do I do with them now?  

Just float, he used to tell me when I was next to him in our sadness sea.

Just float, Ava, he’d say. 

And I would try to listen. 

He used to say my name so it was long. 

It was never a just name, always an exclamation.  

He’s in my favorite songs. 

He’s the star of my favorite movies.  

He’s my favorite part of being here.  

I don’t know how to be here without him.

I want all the information, but I don’t think I should have it.  

I want to know what he was wearing.  

I want to know he wasn’t lonely. 

I want to know he wasn’t scared.  

I want to know where he is right now.

Is he warm enough, do you think, I asked my dad. 

My Judaism seeps through even in grief, I guess. 

I want to know if he knew what he was going to do when we got off the phone. 

What was the last thing he heard me say? 

What was the last thing he said to me? 

We were always in the middle of a conversation. 

Our sentences were run-ons, no periods in sight. 

No endings, just continuation.

But he ended the sentence and I’m still here and I have things to say and much-ness to share and tears to shed and people to love and people to stop loving and he was supposed to be here for all of it, doing the same thing in different ways alongside me.  

I will have good days and bad days and days I forget and all of them will happen without him on the other side of the phone. 

This is just the first week. 

I keep forgetting that this is the start of a chapter in my life that will be defined by his absence. 

This pain cannot be contained. It won’t go away. It will continue. 

It too is a sentence without a period, just many commas and tears and people saying “he’s still with you,” which is true but also fuck you, I want him here with me the way he’s always been and if you keep pretending from way up on your grief-less horse that having him in my life in some vague, spiritual, abstract, wispy way is as good or the same as being able to feel his always clammy hands in mine or being hugged by him, the person who was the perfect height to cradle the top of my head under his chin or sitting on the 405 in traffic and not giving a shit because we’re both listening to music too old and too sad for the way we feel then I don’t have anything to say to you but this: you have no idea what you’re talking about. 

You're handing a bandaid to a person who is drowning and on fire and saying that they’re cured. 

That’s what you’re doing right now. 

And maybe you’ll be right one day. 

I hope that you’re right one day. 

Not today, though.

Today it is this: Henry, dear sweet delicate gentle Henry was next to me and now he’s not.

He was my shadow and I was his and now I’m a shadow without a person and a person without a shadow all at once and there is nothing you can do to help that or change that so instead of telling me how it will be “one day,” just sit with me in this pit in my heart. 

Sit here for a second and if you’re still enough, if you’re quiet enough, maybe I can feel like my shadow is back. 

Maybe I can feel like I’m a shadow again too.  

There is a spike through my brain and a hole in my heart and both things are in the shape of him.  

I don’t want to think about his pain. 

I don’t want him to carry it anymore. 

I never wanted him to carry it.  

There will be people who walk in and out of my life who I will love and hate and be indifferent towards and they won’t have known him.  

I will one day find myself in bed with a man I love who never knew him. 

How will he ever understand me? 

How will he ever see me, really see me, if he doesn’t know the person who lives at the very center of me?  

I don’t want to know people who didn’t know him.  

I want to wrap myself in a blanket of his voice and never come out from under it.  

He’sdeadhe’sdeadhe’sdeadhe’sdeadhe’sdead.  

Funny that that’s in present tense and everything else is supposed to be past tense.  

He’s not, though. Past. He’s passed, not past. 

(He’d have loved and hated that sentence).   

He’s left the party early, someone said, and that was fucked and crass, but also true and kind of wonderful when I think about it because no one loved to leave a party early more than he did.  

It was our favorite thing to do: sneak out.  

We caught each other’s eye from across the room at a dinner party once and in a second, maybe less, we both knew. 

We knew and we were seeing each other and loving each other and hating the party together in a moment so quick and so tiny that no one else knew it was happening. 

It was like we were in two different worlds at the same time. 

Or like how there are millions of dimensions stacked on top of each other or some science thing that I don’t know or understand because grief and science don’t mix and it doesn’t matter anyway because the only thing that mattered is we saw each other and we liked being seen by each other and we left the party hand-in-hand, smoking and giggling and breathless like we stole something and we walked the thirty blocks back home to his apartment and he said he felt like we were a pair of lungs, which might not make sense to you, but that doesn’t matter really because it made sense to us and it was right.  

Here’s the truth: the hard bit: all the love is still there and it’s choking me. 

I want to scoop it out of my chest and hand it to him but I can’t, so I’ll make room for it inside myself. 

And the thing is, it’s only going to grow. 

I think that’s what people don’t talk about: when someone dies, their life ends, but the love you have for them doesn’t. 

The level you loved them, the depth to which you loved them, it doesn’t just stay at some fixed point. 

It grows. 

It grows and grows and grows. 

My love for Henry has tripled in the last twenty minutes. 

It’s not stopping. 

One day it’ll be too big for my body & it’ll leak out of me, I’m sure of it, and it’ll grow into something beautiful.

I love him more and more every day. 

Write something brand new 

Live the life they couldn’t get through 

Maybe you’re out watching from afar 

I’ll make you proud of me 

This hope is what I’ve got 

If that’s all I have of you

I'll take it and depart 

That’s how his song ended. 

And so I will try to listen to him. 

I will make room in my grief and nostalgia and loneliness because that’s what he’s asking me to do. 

Just float.

This is something new. 

This is the first thing I have ever written that he won’t read.

So now I’m alone in the sea we once shared and I’m trying to float just like he’s asking me to do and as hard as it is I think I discovered something: he’s the ocean now. 

When I float, I will be floating on him.