Time moves glacially
A place we all go to, in time
For Eilif
I see you there, sitting on wet, rounded stones, the gritty moraine of glacial gnaw. Reflecting out of opaque blue glass, the ceiling of this ice cave is worn away in pockets and waves, marks from persistent plaguing drips.
I lived there many months, I think. The tinted light refracts time. I’d sleep to hide from the cold dread. Sometimes you see figures reflected in the blue glass. Silhouettes and shadows pass. Memories and hauntings. Some have dimensions, trying to pry you. from your bed of rock at the bottom of the earth.
But to go into the sunlight too soon is to set yourself on fire. Everything outside is uncaring; callous in the way thriving things must be. Better to stay frozen in body, frozen in space, frozen in time. For a while.
I spent days looking at my hands. Remembering the shape of theirs. Cursing those empty-lined hands for acting. Those beloved, accursed, beautiful, agonizing palms. They took what was theirs to take, but they took me, too.
I don’t know what you do in that black-blue room. I used to pile stones on my chest. Tricking my heart to believe it was protected. Perhaps you drip your curly head into the pool of water there, shocking your mind out of despair.
We have to fool ourselves, for a while. Use our bodies as levers to force our psyche to roll over.
I used to run my finger along the ribs and crusts of frost, wondering if it’d melt for all my numbness. My mist of breath would flow and flee in the freezing air. It was the first thing to remind me I was tepid, even warm.
The cave kept dripping, metronomic in the echo of my keening. As it dripped my bones thawed. My movements softened. My core of ice ran like a ribbon down my spine. I went out a fleshless, ice-boned, hollow thing. But I went.
When I hear of you in that indigo room of incremental melt, I am brought back. I see the scalloped ceiling, the rounded wet stones. Another silhouette, I sit beside you as you lay stones upon your chest or howl in the feeble light. No prying, no worrying, no fixing, no warming. Only being, together in the cold.
When I, inevitably, am shattered by loss, I’ll come back to my bed of rock. And you’ll visit me, then. I’ll think that I am frozen, forever. But you’ll know that time moves glacially. Your knowledge may make the pain more bearable. You’ll know—because you’ve done it, in your own time—that I am already softening.
This week I saw beautiful and heartbreaking photos from a friend who’d lost their partner to suicide. Immediately, I imagined this sweet friend laying alone in a glacial cave of grief. It took me back to my own experience of heartbreaking loss, the period when you’re numb and hard and afraid, and the life you knew is melting away from you. In that moment, all you can. do for anyone at all is just sit, “together in the cold.” Though this friend and I are separated by an ocean, love doesn’t know distance. So much love for you, Eilif.
