To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows Read online

  The next week, I consumed some more of the ashes. I thought they might be more palatable if I mixed them in with some liquid and drank them. Water seemed weird and I don’t drink milk, so it wasn’t going be like a chocolate milk situation. I settled on making a smoothie and adding a bit of her in. At first it was just a dash and when I drank it, there was no telling that she was even there. This reminded me of a story I read in a cultural anthropology class in college.

  In the 1920’s, when anthropology was still drowning in colonialism and racism, a white, British anthropologist went to study a Polynesian tribe who were rumored to be cannibalistic. He spent many months with them, never seeing anything to indicate that cannibalism was a part of their culture, until one day when a young woman died in an accident. To celebrate and mourn, the tribe prepared a feast alongside a funerary pyre. As the food cooked on one fire, she burned on the other. After she was reduced to nothing, a tribe elder took some of the ashes from the pyre and sprinkled them into the food that was being cooked. Then the tribe ate together, all consuming a small fraction of the dead young woman’s ashes, as a way of keeping her in the tribe.

  Naturally, the anthropologist wrote extensively about this tribe and all their spooky, cannibalistic tendencies, sparing no detail too lurid and leaving out many of the facts that contextualize their mourning ritual. It wasn’t until many years later, when a different anthropologist went to stay with the tribe, that the truth finally saw the light of day, though, as always, the facts were a lot less captivating than a primitive tribe of Polynesian cannibals.

  Had it mattered, me consuming another part of her? The not being able to tell made my blood run as ice. It wasn’t enough. I poured the contents of the smoothie back into my Vitamix and dumped out all of her ashes from one of the smaller urns. The ash cloud rose out of the blender and got into my nose. I could smell the salt of her, still from the original urn. My eyes watered as I blended the ash into the smoothie and poured it out once again.

  What had been vaguely orange-ish was now a pale yellow-grey. Small specks of dark grey littered the glass, as they had been up the sides of the pitcher. I took a sip and it tasted bitter and cold, a perfect analogy for what my life had become. The salt fought against the fruit and made me pucker as I chugged. This was not a drink for sipping, but it was still significantly better than the mouthful of ash. I could do this. I had to do this.

  As the weeks, and then months, passed, I found myself at the mercy of this ritual. Finding a small, tin measuring quarter cup in the back of a kitchen drawer allowed me to find the perfect measurement of ash, as to not overwhelm my mouth. A frozen banana, a few berries, a cup and a half of orange juice, a small amount of coconut oil, and a quarter cup of her. This is what got me through the morning. Every time I did it, I felt closer to her; even though she was gone, I still carried her with me all day. The sorrow didn’t go, but neither did she, and that was enough.

  My plans to bury her at low tide in the Mississippi River became more and more distant, until I didn’t think about it anymore. The totality of my focus became obsessing over how much of her was left and how long I would have before she was gone. Eventually, as it goes, there wasn’t a ton left. So, I started rationing it. An eighth of a cup became the new normal. My taste buds had acclimated to the amount of her I had been consuming and this newfound reduction made me feel ill, every time. There was less of her and I could feel it, inside. I was losing her.

  I wondered if by reducing my intake of other food, maybe my metabolism would slow down and I could keep her inside of me longer. The only thing I allowed myself to consume was my daily smoothie and two cups of water. I stopped sleeping, stopped seeing people. I stopped seeking anything but her embrace. I chased it like a drug and tried to never let it go. My stomach shrunk and groaned. I stopped shitting; I didn’t care, it didn’t matter. At that rate, I would have her for another few weeks. What was beyond that, I couldn’t bring myself to think about.

  Eventually my stomach stopped groaning. I was frail and weak, having lost nearly 30 pounds. For a while there, my pee was thick and had a grayish tint, but that also ceased to be a function that my body did. My right eye constantly twitched. I had heard an old wives tale that this was indicative of an iron deficiency. I don’t know if that’s true, but I started adding a handful of spinach to my smoothie. The pale yellow-grey became a pale green-grey. I wondered if the fiber from the spinach would make me shit again. It didn’t. And the eye twitching remained.

  My hands started going numb and feeling useless, my joints swelled up. By this point, I only had a few more days worth of her, so I cut back even further. A sixteenth of a cup became the new ration. I couldn’t do this forever, but I could make it last a couple more days. I even tried taking a break. It was an attempt to see if every-other day would be sufficient. Without her in me though, I not only felt dead inside, but I threw up the nothing in my stomach. Black strands of stiff mucous eventually wormed their way up my throat and out my mouth. They shimmered with cloudy red trails in the toilet water. I passed out on the cold tile while praying to her. Through salt-chapped lips, I whispered her name, begging her to stay with me, pleading with her not to go. At some point things went black and I awoke to the dog whimpering in the other room.

  I had forgotten that I even had a dog. Nero. He had basically been our son, when Mona was still here, and I had been neglecting him for an unknown period of time. I could vaguely recall, in ashen bliss and exhaustion, letting him in and out, feeding him, and making sure there was water in his bowl, but I couldn’t remember the last time I touched him or talked with him.

  Crawling on all fours, I met him in the bedroom. He shivered and yawned, whining the whole time, even after I pushed my body against his. He felt warm, despite the tremors, warm and comfortable. I passed out again and when I came to he was gone. I assumed he was in another room, but I didn’t bother checking. Another couple of days went by and I couldn’t bring myself to try again without consuming her. And like that, all I had left was enough for one more smoothie.

  As carefully as I could, I collected the remnants at the bottom of the urn. Honestly, it was half salt and half ash. Not exactly the best of the bunch. But I needed it. The dark things that existed on the other side of that day were of no consequence in that moment; they would be dealt with eventually. It would all have to be dealt with eventually.

  LOVE LIKE BLOOD

  Four bourbons in and Lee could feel himself finally break out of the thousand-yard stare that he carried wherever he went. He hated that he did it, and he knew it was happening; it was just damn impossible to stop. It’s not something one sets out to do; it was a product of trauma. He’d seen that same look – the one he knew he had but no one would talk about – on the faces of paramedics, soldiers, and a friend who spent too many years in prison. It’s not a normal stare, not your typical head in the clouds, spacing out expression. There’s a void in the eyes, a void that wasn’t there before the trauma.

  Somehow it had been six years and he still had the stare, he wondered if it was ever going away. The time since Sonja died was now longer than the time they shared together. This realization never ceased to fuck him up since he did the math the previous year. Had she not died, they would have already passed a decade together. He couldn’t help himself from contemplating all the what-ifs. He knew it wasn’t healthy, that it wasn’t productive, but if she had gotten her heart looked at and the doctors had found the tissue disorder before her aorta exploded at 31, what would their lives look like now?

  He shook it off and tried to take his mind off the past, off his grief. Six years is a long time, but apparently not long enough to get on the other side of this. He wondered if, much like the thousand-yard stare, maybe this would never go away. Not that it needed to. With the pain of a tender wound aggravated, he trickled a bit of blood at the idea of ever, really, being over her death. But maybe there would be a time where it didn’t wreck him whenever he thought about it. He motioned to the barte
nder, who poured two more fingers as Lee took in the bar.

  T-Rock was home, with all the memories that brought with it. It felt lived in, grimy, authentic, DIY. So many nights and hung-over mornings spent eating, drinking, talking, and laughing. The night was moderately busy, maybe a little slow for a Saturday, but that’s gonna happen when the show on the venue side is local bands only. Lots of familiar faces wandering around, but no one that he would call a friend, no one he wanted to talk with – at least not in this state of mind. But then he caught a glance of, from the corner of his eye, a distressingly familiar tattoo.

  The tattoo adorned the hand of a woman sitting at the other end of the bar, her black-brown hair cloaking her face as she leaned forward in her chair to grab a beer from the bartender. It was a crescent moon surrounded by clouds that bled down onto her knuckles. Somehow, it was the one Sonja had. Not exact, but startlingly close, or maybe he couldn’t remember it that well, anymore; maybe it was identical. It was even on the correct hand. She shifted back in her seat and pushed her hair back behind her shoulder. Lee didn’t know what he expected her to look like, but it wasn’t this. She could have been Sonja’s twin.

  His stomach went sour as his veins filled with ice, his mind bombarded with snow. The tremble in his eye that he hadn’t felt in years came back, twitching and pulsating as he stared at her. This wasn’t just a passing, family style resemblance; they were supernaturally similar. He watched her movements as he slowly breathed in and out, trying to slow the pounding in his chest. Her movements, this faux-Sonja, this dopple-Sonja, were again similar, but slightly different. Not that he remembered every subtle movement true-Sonja had ever made, but in the general memory of her mannerisms, dopple-Sonja was slightly off, and eerily so, at that. Or had time, grief, perverted his memory of her?

  As rabid as his heart was racing, his mind was going twice as fast, but he couldn’t catch anything, it felt like static. He tried his best to focus, wondering if he should approach her. Maybe he should leave. He was terrified, but captivated, so he continued to stare. She was talking with someone, this dopple-Sonja. It was a man in a suit who Lee had never seen before. He wasn’t one to judge, but the man looked out of place in this dingy punk bar on the West-Bank of Minneapolis. All types were encouraged, obviously, but that suit looked expensive and he wore it like it wasn’t a once a year occasion. He was not your random, just got out of a courtroom, time for a drink of regret or celebration style customer. After a few minutes of brief conversation with dopple-Sonja, the man headed out of the bar, but not before making eye contact with Lee, and gently nodding his head.

  Lee knew he’d fucked up, sitting there, drink in hand, thousand-yard staring directly at the two of them for minutes without breaking focus. The noise in his head returned. He wondered, momentarily, if this was a dream, but he knew it wasn’t – it was all too linear. The same thing happened when Sonja, true-Sonja, died. He could feel his mind pulsing towards any thought that would make it unreal, that would abstract it, obscure his new reality, but he fought back, he knew the day had made too much sense.

  As Lee shrugged off the notion that he was in a dream, dopple-Sonja looked at him. This wasn’t a glance. From across the bar she stared into his eyes. He could feel her crawling into his brain, burrowing, and making a home there. His breath became shallow as she talked with the bartender for a moment who then came over and poured two more fingers in Lee’s glass. Before he could react, dopple-Sonja was walking over, through the thinning crowd, and had taken the empty seat to his left. He could feel the icy blood rush to his cheeks as he sat like a sculpture, unsure what to do as she stared at him.

  Dopple-Sonja spoke first, not in true-Sonja’s voice, but a close approximation. Her lips flecked with a mischievous grin as she spoke, “Hey there, mister man. I missed you. I’m sure there have been a million bad days since the last time we saw each other…”

  Lee felt his bile rise into his throat as the room began to spin. Fright gripped at his spine as his face went numb and his vision was clouded with stars. He fought against the white-noise building in his ears, taking in every drop of every letter of every word from every sentence; he tried to breathe in her essence, but he also wanted to run. She stared at him, with an optimistic glint in her eyes. Lee suppressed every competing urge. One wanted to scream, one wanted to run, another tried its best to vomit; his tear ducts were loaded and ready. He imagined himself falling through the floor, into an unknown darkness, forever.

  Logic came of no support. There was no logic anymore; there was no reality and no truth. He was sitting in a bar next to his dead…wife? His dead wife’s doppelganger? It made no sense. She sure knew him. Maybe he had lost the memories of the minutia of her movements and mannerisms as the years passed. What if this was her? Sonja, true-Sonja, called him mister man. “A million good days,” was a phrase of hers, from her wedding vows. He made the inverse reference after she died to some friends, “A million bad days…” If they understood it or not was of no consequence, these were pieces of he and Sonja’s lexicon. He soaked the words in, holding them in his mind.

  Unsure of how to proceed, Lee pushed all thoughts from his brain and embraced the possibility that he was sitting here, like so many nights before she died, at a bar they both loved, drink in hand and in the company of the most amazing person he had ever met. Small voices screamed as loud as they could, in strange corners of his brain, that this was wrong; this was all so terribly wrong and this was not only impossible, but fucked up. With every voice, he did his best to silence it. Tossing back all four fingers of his glass, he ordered another and shakily asked the bartender for, “A High Life, and whatever she’s having.”

  The bartender came back with two beers, a tallboy of swill for Lee and a pint of something caramel colored in a pint-glass for her. Dopple-Sonja, Ghost-Sonja, This-Sonja, never broke her stare, boring a hole in the side of Lee’s face with her unflinching gaze. He assured himself that he had been given some kind of fucked up, impossible second chance, and that he had to take it no matter how painful, awkward, or impossible it all felt. Lee wondered, mockingly, if maybe all the years of drunkenly yelling, “Hail Satan!” as a stand-in ‘Cheers!’ had paid off and that man in the suit was the Devil. Maybe he thought he owed Lee one. And maybe now Lee owed the Devil. Whatever His cost, he reasoned, would be worth it.

  Lee forced himself into the present, still fighting off all manner of internal implosion and explosion. Turning to her, towards this-Sonja, he said a mental prayer to the nothing. He had been used to praying to her. Well, not exactly praying, but talking to her in his mind when things were good, or bad. But now that she, or some almost-she, was sitting in front of him, it seemed wrong to ask some other, possibly non-existent, cosmic version of her for help or guidance. So he asked the uncaring universe, maybe for a bit of help, a bit of luck.

  They locked eyes and Lee knew he was in trouble. Staring back at him were the same big, brown eyes that had first told him that they loved him. This was the face of the woman he loved with a wholeness that he hadn’t realized even existed before he met her. This was the face of the woman who he watched die, one random late-summer day, holding her increasingly cold hand as the paramedics tried to save her. This face, now inches from his, was everything he had ever wanted; everything he ever wanted back. His heart tore in two places, as he wrestled with his worst nightmare, long since having come true, and most unattainable dream, now staring into his eyes, colliding into a black vacuum of silent chaos inside.

  Words were substandard symbols of the massively complex concepts that they represented. There was no string of letters or words that could come anywhere near what was going on in his head, in his heart. He painfully processed through how to convey any of this to dopple-Sonja, or this-Sonja, or maybe now just Sonja, sitting next to him. All that came out was the refrain, through salt-rich tears, which had become the slogan of his life since she died, “What the fuck?!”

  She laughed. “By some otherworldly means, we fi
nd ourselves together again. How about you don’t ruin it by asking too many questions, because I don’t have any answers. Let’s drink this round, get another, and spend the time we have together dancing to some Minneapolis punk on the venue side.”

  Lee, despite everything screaming inside, couldn’t disagree. They swiftly drank what they had, ordered another round, and headed into the venue. His skin went tight, as their flesh briefly touched while walking through the venue-side door. Their soundtrack was a dissonant swirl of melodic chaos, harrowing screams, and pummeling drums, as the two danced, drank, and touched like when they had both been alive. The night felt like any number they had shared in their 5+ years together. For Lee, it felt so right, despite the voice in his head screaming how wrong it was.

  He shuddered at her touch, and they howled at the moon, obscured by the venue ceiling. When he could dance no more, when he felt all the wind beneath his sails having gone far off into the night, when he could barely stand, through drunken revelry; that is when they fully embraced. Her tongue was salty, warm, like he remembered it in his dreams. She felt electrified. Lee felt disoriented, in all possible ways. As on the day of their wedding, after the, “You may now kiss,” they embraced first with mouth, but then squeezed each other tightly, as though the other might slip away. It was in that moment of full, hugging embrace, when Lee felt his heart open and bleed into hers. It was in that moment, when he, despite his best efforts, began to slip away.