still struggling

Just tell me what happened. David sits very still in his chair. He watches me very carefully. Just tell me, in plain language. Until you do, this thing will haunt everything you write and I will get very tired of reading about it.

Oh yes- I look incredulous- it's already there. The dead woman being hoisted up into the clouds by her late husband. The man who drinks his milk from a bottle, the mother who moves like an insect, the infant under the earth- all different anchors off the same ship. Just- he moves close- this isn't class. No radio, no ocean, no otter- the otter always confused me, why did you ever write about an otter? Just tell me in very plain language, what happened?

Yes, what did happen. Where did things go wrong, or were they running wrong, as he perpetually insisted, from the beginning?

My poor professor, who has no time for this. Who began every class with, "good afternoon class. Melina- how are you doing?" Who gave me in response to showing up at his office, pleading with him for something to make sense of, only this: a news article about a man dying in a parachuting accident, because he had been so excited to film the jumpers, he had forgotten his own parachute, and in the film you hear him screaming in delight and then reach up for his shoot- tug- then, uh-oh (audible)- then, the film ends.

So I try to be very clear with him. I close my eyes.

The girl in the ocean rocking herself to sleep. Reaching out in that sleep for the person who should have been there by now turning on the damp sheets- each night she reaches farther. Her hands clenching into fists around air- waking up in sudden panic. Each morning waking up as if her body has sprung a leak. There is a difference between catastrophe and free will, but which one is harder to take- that is impossible to know.

And the radio, there is always a radio steady as a clock, comforting. And then the radio dies.

What is worse than inevitable tragedy is tragedy that is late to it's own party. Or, that never shows up at all.

That's what the silence says, after the radio died. Before that, there was the ticking. The morning that said, keep punching. But he never came back home. He said I'm leaving you, and I'm not going to bother to throw punches. And the feeling of the air where his fist should have been, against my collar bone, my cheek bone- it burned like something terrible, that lives in the sea, that in some better time we might have gone to look at, in it's glass cage.