Safe word

After you died, I tried to remember the word we agreed we would use if we were ever separated. A safe word of sorts. A word that a stranger would tell you to communicate, it’s okay, you can come with me.

It was a secret terror of mine that I would not properly recall the word in the event that I needed someone to fetch you. Was it pineapple or grapefruit?

*

After you died I developed a horror of the boxes of photos underneath the stairs. When I am dead, they will end up in the garbage. Wouldn’t it be better to go now to the backyard and set the boxes aflame along with last year’s raspberry canes?

After you died, I received an email from an old flame. The message came up on my computer at work. It was morning, I had the door closed. I had the lights off.

I could not form the words: hello, good to hear from you, I love you, my son is dead.

So I cried and pressed my fingers into the rubber sensation of my eyes, beyond which tiny points of light corresponded to a painful distant nebula.

Is that where you are?! I yelled silently into the blackness of my head.

*

After you died, I started doing things I formerly had not done.

I simply lick my spoon at work after every meal instead of washing it.

Instead of rinsing the shampoo out of my hair with fresh water from the tap, I lie back in the soupy water and let my hair relax around me in kelpy turmoil.

I mix up my words, so that when I say sex, I mean politics, and when I say sweat, I mean intimacy.

I listen to music via headphones when cycling. After work, streaming down the hill toward the lights of downtown, god’s glory is in my ears, and god’s wind flows down my shirt into the space around my breasts because I am not wearing a bra.

God’s space made sweaty with cycling and cooled with god’s wind as I descend into the multicoloured lights of Sodom and Gomorrah.

When I say god, I mean death, and when I say death, I mean forevermore.

*

After you died, I searched for you. Each day a new method. Legend, lore, liquor, licentiousness. I would find you, or I would let it kill me.

And if I can’t find you, I’ll send the next me on that journey. The one that emerges from the heap of this one—because you probably won’t recognize the old one—bronzed and blue-hot—calling out, grapefruit, pineapple, pineapple, grapefruit.