A Breath Too Late - Rocky Callen Page 0,57

story?”

59

Momma,

As you get into your car, you stare at our house. “This day was supposed to be for us, Ellie,” you say, turning on the engine.

I watch as the familiar setting fades. The boarded-up windows. The potholes. The sidewalk cracks.

We drive to the mountains. The urn is on the passenger seat, my seat—all of me nothing but ashes. I sit in the back seat like when I was little, looking at your chocolate eyes in the rearview mirror.

The urn was white, but August made it mine. He took his paints and made me into stars and color, the words from my Sharpied shoes dancing in the sky along with the soaring origami birds. That was how the people I loved saw me. That is what I needed to see.

The moment that August handed the urn to Momma, I felt myself slipping away. I couldn’t save anyone. I couldn’t fix anything. I couldn’t use my two incorporeal hands. I could only see: the pain I dealt, the promises that had been waiting, the ones who loved me and saw my heart as something beautiful even when I couldn’t.

We drive away.

I always liked our drives—the wandering, the possibility, the adventure within them. And as I watch the sun glint off the mirror and into your eyes, I know that this will be our last one.

We arrive at Blue Moon Mountain and you park the car off Sunrise Trail. Your shoulders are shaking as you clutch the urn and two ripped and fading paper birds to your chest.

There it is: our fortress. Our castle that we fought for on our last drive to the mountains when you were a queen and I was a warrior.

You exhale loudly before setting the two birds on the stone ledge side by side.

The trees part to show a valley of farms at the foot of the mountains. Patches of green. There is a breeze that blows your hair into your brown eyes.

My ashes are tucked against your chest. Your voice shakes, but it is real. The tears aren’t being suffocated by pillows and no one here will hurt you.

“We were locked in a box for so long, I didn’t want to bury you in one.”

Now your hands are shaking too. You slowly open the urn and let my ashes fly in the wind.

And then, you sing.

It catches me off guard to hear your voice tremble and rise on the breeze.

You sing about two birds with torn wings who still could be free. It is beautiful and terrible all at the same time. An ocean of unsaid words, of secrets, of whole hearts and whole truths and no room for lies, an undercurrent of pain that could seize and drown the whole world. And even when your voice shakes and breaks, you still sing.

The notes fall on one another just like August’s music and I wonder if it is because grief feels like falling, like a rug being yanked from under you and you don’t even brace for the fall because you want it to hurt.

The words clink and fall and fly together in your voice and all your words are for me. The words you kept hidden under my mattress, the words I wanted to hear, the words that were always mine.

We are birds with paper wings. Just because the wings were tattered, doesn’t mean they could never fly. It doesn’t mean that their little fragile lives were worth nothing.

I feel myself drifting away from you.

You will grow new wings, Momma.

That minivan with the mismatched doors will help you fly for now.

You have chocolate eyes and freckles just like me. And I am grateful to have dreamed with you even for just a little while. I just wish I could wake up and live those dreams with you now. We were constellations of misery pressed into a dark and desolate canvas. I had forgotten that the stars were still beautiful. I had forgotten that so were we.

Hope can’t be a hollow wish or dream. It needs to be filled, levied, brimming over with intention and action and belief and reaching, reaching, reaching, stretching until your muscles ache because you want it that damn much, and you won’t stop reaching until you hold it.

Until it is yours.

I let go too soon.

60

Life,

You were broken, often ugly, and always too much, but you also hid promises in pockets, tucked hope under mattresses, and crammed a thousand perfect moments between the shards of sharp and treacherous ones.

I am sorry I had forgotten them.

I am sorry I didn’t even see.

And a breath too late, I realized …

I loved you.