\ gravities

When she was at her weakest, I carried her over to the couch, the earth seeming to have completely loosened its hold, her lightness, causing me to wonder about the way we describe this, 'the gravity of the situation.' Is it that we feel the weight of loss, the graveness of peril? In life, she has been neither larger nor smaller than most, but unique, a drop of water sideways in an eddy, let go from its daily revolutions into the larger current, along weathered walls, denser than its surroundings, yet impelled to the surface, over a peak, only to stop halfway down. She is a snowflake now, set upon the slipstream.

I have done this before, headfirst and headlong, able to pull up and float, or accidentally knock over a cup and catch it before the ground.

You should have let it, she says. The shards bring luck.

I place it on the table, but very near the edge. Hope for it.

I dreamed this. Don't take it from me.

She said to mend the neighbor's fence, that it be like mending our own.

Those were not her words, she says. I hope you will not misrepresent me so when I am in her state.

I won't. I will pray for you.

Don't you dare!

Alex came into the yard, kneeled alongside the new bed I put in next to the shade garden. I could see her hat rise and fall through the window. What are you doing there? She had thinned out the seedlings, they lay in a pile at her feet, already dried and ready to take flight.

I just planted those!

So many flowers with new names now, 'forget me nots' and 'better left unsaids.'

I didn't know! I'm sorry!

What grew instead were weeds. Thistle, mullein and bottlebrush. They took no water, brought in all the pretty, wild birds. You could cut mazes through and through, like little rows of secrets, tall as crape myrtle, bare, crooked arms like snakes shedding their skins, falling, falling, falling to the ground, opalescent veils for the dying milkweed.