itch, shock
I’m terrified of being stung by a bee. It’s a silly thing. There’s no history of bee allergies in my family. No one I know or even heard of has ever had a fatalistic encounter with one & yet the mysterious chance of it amazes & frightens me. To be stung by a bee once, the first time, is a red & bumpy annoyance. An itch & a memory buried beneath time. The second sting is what kills, what causes someone to go into shock & then, quite abruptly, die.
It’s amazing what the body remembers.
I remember a hive, thick & teeming with sound. A cousin with a hose pointed at the doorway. An urge to run on the count. Three screams. A blurred foot. Grass sharp beneath wet fingers. Whether this happened or was dreamt is irrelevant now. It’s already nightmared its way out of adolescence & this is part ghost story.
I’m at an intersection of grief, where I’m unsure of my hands & who they might’ve held once. All week I’ve had only bread & cheese each morning & then again at night. I told myself I was fine in between mouthfuls of brie. I don’t have the time to mourn. I don’t have the will. If there was ever a thing I wish I didn’t know, let it be how it feels to be left behind.
This death was not my first & not even my most senseless. Once, in another winter or spring, an old lover distantly died. All I could summon then was how he mispronounced me, stretched my name into more syllables than it started with, even after sex. How his hair fell over his face just so sometimes. Here, I did not go hungry.
After my sixth or seventh bagel I had to admit that it would be easier to cry, though marginally less filling, so I imbued myself with both the bread & the loss. Let my partner hold me & say the things he’s supposed to. I think of all the things that Johnny might say to my sorrow, whether our hands had ever met at any intersections. He begged me for a poem once and I gave it to him with my name at the bottom. This counts in a way that doesn’t, in the way a bee or the cold are sharp enough to kill a man while you’re ordering your coffee one morning.
I think that he’d ask after the bees. If we made it. If they survived. If I’m caught between the itch or the shock & what I’m willing to do about it.
