Blossom

The trees are beautiful this time of year. They hang here in the tininess resting until they can’t bear to any longer. Then they unwind, fall open as if disturbed internally, to show us their beautiful mouths. My friend, Blossom, is not part of a new tree. She is not the redeeming feature of an ugly bare branch. She has legs and arms and a heart that throbs with the tides of salt and blood wrestling in the pinches of her veins. She is lying in the ICU where death’s romance can be its fattest and its blankest. Her position in her bed is straight and neutral. They have left her in the position we would sleep in if life was flawless and strong. Her hair is mousy and brushed, brushed like it might never be cut. Just now, she woke up to speak to me with a fruitless scar expanding in her unseeing pupils and an air of surprise she brought forth with her from an interrupted dream. She took my hand in hers like it was the beginning of a concrete floor being poured, she stubbed out her words on my fingers with hers and asked me to leave before the music arrived. I said, yes; promised I would. Her voice shivered like wild grass when it finds the places where man still can’t touch it. What have you brought me, she said. Only my hands, I told her. Then she fell asleep.

Just now, I wondered through the night and it took me to nowhere. I sat inside the grasses and unriddled my early dementia. I heard distant toilets flush with the weight of their loneliness along the lines of the great dark trench, a carriage way road in the duality of our fields. The air was curtain soft and stuffy. I believe a more sensitive thing would drown in it if it was put where I sit in the hustle, might receive a bruise or an exhaustive rip. I remembered all Blossom’s last words as I went to rest, taking in the guttural remains of a cigarette to prove that death can lead to a little life renewed if it burns badly enough, and I remembered how she had said her last words to me, slowly and without force; no more worries, no more sorrows, no more thoughts. She had lifted her face to the ceiling with her eyes shut for that last tender privacy, opened her big weak mouth like a wavering bow and said it like so; no more worries, no more sorrows, no more thoughts. She had divided her duvet into dents so fragile I mistook them for bits of shade and made the gentle surface into a tenement roof riddled with drains for pieces of a worn body, receded with a bird swallow into the falling chick physique of a basket of hay tipping its contents into the air, and carefully said; no more worries, no more sorrows, no more thoughts.