Song for a Selkie

I wanted to write something about mortality. I wonder at our assumption about the finality of death — the notion that all this could ever end seems to me a misdiagnosis. If a fruit falls from the tree and rots, its flesh and seeds become a part of the earth and it lives on in dozens of new forms, its life spreading ever outwards into infinity.

I can’t say I’ve yet lived up to my potential, but at twenty-eight, if I died tomorrow, I could genuinely look back on my life as something to be proud of all the same.

I wanted to write something about mourning, about how no one’s ever taught me how to do it. Grief is a dust to be swept under the rug, a weed to be plucked and removed from sight. Even the ones who welcome the process, we still don’t know how. The pain of loss comes out in drips and bursts and then the pipe runs dry until it all clogs up and screams out sideways again.

In emergencies, I get emotionless and clinical. I do what needs to be done, whatever I can do, until there’s nothing left to try. I become one with adrenaline and save the pain for later. When the time comes that there’s nothing left to do, that’s when the grief begins to knock on the door and this time, there’s no way to drown out the noise of it.

I wanted to write something to you, Meghan, but I have no words to say except I love you. I love you. I don’t know if you’re at peace or in danger, if you’re breathing, if you’re cold out there, if you’ve found your way home to your mama with the Kelly green grass and no socks and the laughter.

I want to tell you that I miss you, that I don’t know if I’m mourning or hoping but it’s a little of both. In the presence of your absence, I find myself at a loss of anything to do except love whoever is around and might need love. I think that’s what I’ll just keep doing forever. I think that’s what you’d want us all to do.

I imagine that you touched a magic stone and got transported to the heights of Machu Picchu, that you’re unraveling every mystery up there and finding ways to write the answers for me in the stars. I imagine you in Ireland, in the Puget Sound, in the wind. I’m waiting for you to call me and tell me about the coy dogs you heard howling in the woods. I’m waiting to shoot the shit about alchemy and patriarchy and the weird cosmic wordplay of being alive.

I’m waiting to tell you how it felt to say goodbye.

This world has grown so big and complicated when life itself is simple. I’ve recommitted to simplicity. I’m making no plans. I’m waiting here for you, for the purr of Schrodinger’s cat, for the call that says “She’s home” or says “The police have found a body.” I’m feeling everything I can feel for now. I’m lighting candles. I’m being kind. I’m doing everything you’d want me to.

If it’s true that you’ve shed your skin and flown away, know that I can take that. I’ll mourn, and I’ll learn from you. I’ll write poetry again. I’ll stand at the banks of the Mohawk river and sing Joanna Newsom and I’ll find someone to play the harp. You always lived halfway across the veil, mercurial as anything. It would only ever have been a step to cross it.

If that’s what you have done, then I’ll know you’re always close. The veil is right in front of us and if you’re right behind it, then I’ll listen for you smiling once again. I’ll listen to Echoes, all twenty-five minutes of it, finding new galaxies to explore in every note.

For now, I love you, and I’m waiting. For now, know that wherever you are, I’m learning from you how to shed everything but love.