The other day

The other day
someone’s father died. Someone at work.
It was a weekend and it passed by in a flash. I forgot
to write my condolences. Maybe I didn’t know what to say,
or so I tell myself. Because in afternoons when I am overcome
by drowsiness and all is still, there is a slant of light that makes
me pause and think. Like a rat in a lab, I feel a faint signal to my skull.
I am capable of feeling, at the fringes. Somewhat. I feel the imprints
of plants, their tiny hands made of light, trying to find ways to connect
to the earth and sky. But my windows are shut. I eat and laugh it all out.
And when 40,000 people die, I still go on. I am bothered though,
by my closet and how it spills out on its own accord on empty chairs,
day after day. The opaque pattern of being an animal, caught
between straight lines. When she comes back to work on another day,
her face is swollen like the moon. I hear her, typing away next door
and laughter in the corridors. I want to say life has a way of making
other gardens in your heart grow around the pain. That life has a way
of bringing you back to the present again. That what helped others
will now help you overcome. Welcome the laughter like the chirping of
birds around you. That like rats helping other rats, we will help each
other too, prodded first by a sense of sharp electrifying urgency.
Don’t fret. We will react. That it is in our system, sitting right next to
self-preservation. That you are safe in this togetherness.
That death will seek us all—only on different days.

And maybe that is the only curse.