For Abbey

I know death. Some days I wear its hollowness and malaise like my favorite sweater and I pretend that I don’t feel the pain seeping through every single one of my pores.

We first met when it took my cat. I had sensed it lingering in doorways and hiding behind curtains for weeks, but on the night it finally came, I didn’t wake. Its ability to sneak in and out alarmed me. I looked at my cat, laying still in a cardboard box as the sun shone down on the shell of who she was. Screams came out of my lungs but stopped in my throat as I pet her little head one last time.

Sometimes I breathe easily; almost lazily. Then I call out to death and remind it that I’m not afraid. I don’t fear it for I already know it.

I know the way it makes your knees buckle until you find yourself on the bathroom floor, phone still glued to your white-knuckled hands. I know the way it makes the tears in your eyes dry up as you wonder how a grown man could possibly fit in such a small coffin, and how your ears refuse entry to the words of the priest as you fixate on the pine box.

I know the way it announces its arrival with soft apologies. I know how it forces vomit out of your stomach while you sit in the front seat of the car and try to scream it away. I know that it dries out your mouth while you sign a piece of paper and pick up earrings from the counter. I know how it tries and fails to merge the image of your mother with that of the small box sitting on your lap.

I do not, however, know near-death. I don’t know how it feels to be counting fallen strands of hair and to be deciding what to do when the only person I truly feel safe with ends up inside one of death’s boxes. I don’t know the maddening beeping pattern that heartrate monitors follow, and I don’t know how to take fragments of future plans and fit them all into an ever-shrinking present.

I know how to tell you that I love you. I know how to say that you’re exquisite and brilliant and shine too brightly. I know that you will suffer when you meet death but I know that death is not what you fear most; you fear that the time until its arrival will be much too short. You fear its current absence.