Tuscaloosa Runs This Turn around.
36
Detour back to your grandmother’s house after the funeral. Everyone looks thinner. Exhausted. The kitchen counters have been invaded by casseroles and the pastel colored saran wrap that tarps them give the dishes a jellyfish appearance. Your body feels hollow with hurt. Outside the toads sing for you once again but it sounds distant, as if the music is being salvaged from the warped grooves of a record. It’s the crickets that reach you now, the way they violin their legs into something constant. Pain isn’t just something that recedes. Your mother hugs you and then your father walks into it. Your brother. Your grandmother. Uncles and aunts and cousins, until one by one the ones he loved most are holding each other up. The architecture of survivors. Stop. Separate into strands of hair, eyelashes, pennies. Try to imagine the men that must have come in the night, their hands digging into the soil and leaving behind the oaks. How there was a river and then someone constructed a boat. How the library that tucked you away on rainy afternoons and introduced you to Steinbeck wasn’t always there. How everything that has vanished will be remembered, will be carried by thought and other hands. Open your eyes. Know your city breathes.