Those years you died –

I tried to fill my days
With greed.

I have never been able to tell if I love. The word defines such a definite state, a checklist or epic, a dance or a look. All these pieces and more are scattered like crumbs or clues across things humans make. I also, it seems, cannot find grief. 

Rather, I grieve all the time for many things: cicadas with the wings ripped off; smashed frogs; the sky; children, learning things; people who die in winter, slipping under before spring melts the river-ice. I think of grief as the sounds of water under ice, in a winter wood: soft, mostly, always there. Step wrong, and – it wells through blackly, tannin-stewed and rich as oil, twice as slick across the skin and staining, staining strong. 

Senses all deprived, it seemed,

Of reason.

(What a season, drenched
Across springs -)

It might have made more sense had I learned in winter, but it was already spring. Surrounded by an apocalypse of green, the person I should love the most was facing transition, transformation, into an object of grief. Calmly, I asked questions and made suggestions. 

I recommended books that did not help. I listened, and sent a poem that reminded me of a shared conversation, “Bird Among Branches.” It did not land well. So I didn’t send more, too unsure of what other uncertainties and motifs might bleed through to infect further.

I listened each week to the monotony of illness, the claustrophobia and the small slipping of things that had held firm for years. I tried to feel more than detached. Sometimes I was slightly frustrated. Many times I was tired – not in any way fixable by rest. Like the numbness of damaged skin, or the aftermath of a burned mouth, my affection lost flavor, and no other sense took over. 

I tried to write, memories mostly. “Things To Not Talk About” and “Marginalia” and “Gravity Gave Up On A Lovely Spring Day” are from around that time. The process of drafting and editing furthered my disassociation, except for the times tears came. I felt better when they did, as they meant I was not dead. 

Time, now, leaked
An all-seamed wrong urge:
Scrolls of clocks unraveling still – so spilled –
In fury knit the score –

When I was not failing to grieve, I read. I had discovered danmei novels, the works of MXTX and a few others. While waiting for sequential library holds, I scrolled Tumblr for fulfillment, and soon clicked the fan fiction multiverse of AO3. Then my nerves returned.

I bled pages
For more. Killed, each night,
By light-locked page – return, trust only
Things that burn
To intoxicate: all yearnings formed
Perfect-disgraced
And rampant.

AO3 is, according to its main webpage, “a fan-created, fan-run, nonprofit, noncommercial archive for transformative fanworks, like fanfiction, fanart, fan videos, and podfic.” “Transformative fanworks” is both precise and accurate: to wit, fan-written works expanding or subverting or exploding the stories of other creators’ characters. Popular fandoms (Marvel or Pokemon) have thousands of pieces. Some are terribly written; some are unfinished. More are well – or even brilliantly – written. Regardless of flavor, however, most are some form of smut. 

Did the characters love or hate, or never meet? Were they obstructed by circumstance, or their own personalities; did they live in different times, did they lose their memories, did they die. (If so – did they kill each other? Was anyone dismembered or eaten?) 

Did their eyes meet once, did they duel, did they share dessert or wine or steamed buns or aphrodisiacs or hallucinogens or (specific mostly to a subset of the MXTX fandom) Heavenly Demon blood? 

Whatever the character pairing, whatever the canon states: a different version exists, over and over and over. Roll the combinations, and see how many times a thing can happen. See the impossible, and insane, profane (so much profane); see healing. Sweat and tears and … other fluids, more Heavenly Demon blood (conveniently abbreviated HDB at this point, it has its own archival tags – many archival tags exist, some worth more than the story itself. Among the most iconic is Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, drawn from an Arrested Development episode) – see comfort, and at least eight “The Way It Should Have Happened” moments. 

See the next story, and the next. Contradictions are resolved and resurrected and rejoiced in; laughter and drama and tragedy, but all characters are alive, will be alive, across infinite try-agains. 

Written pairings ease the pinned-wide shove
Of spring’s disease with: this too
Is also fine.

AO3 does not have a library wait time. It lives inside my phone, and is free. For anticipated internet outages, favorite pieces can even be downloaded. It can follow me everywhere, and it did. I devoted hours, in all circumstances and environments, to searching for good pieces amid the infinite scroll. From the notorious tag Dead Dove: Do Not Eat; to, I Will Go Down With This Ship (through Bad Prep, Mildly Dubious Consent, Canon-Typical Violence, Demonic Courting Rituals, Hopeful Ending, Unreliable Narrator, The Many Creative Uses for Heavenly Demon Blood, and…you know what, never mind) –   I did not need to write anything at all. Everything had already been written. Everything.

When I was unable to read – due to, say, being at work – I could still speculate. In my head I constructed my own versions, usually even more smut-based than the smut they were based on. I wanted to try all eight “The Way It Should Have Happened”-s, at least in theory.  I wanted dessert and wine and steamed buns, maybe aphrodisiacs, pass on the hallucinogens, and – with very specific negotiated consents in place – HDB. 

I tried to fill my days
With greed. Shape, tooth and quill, or

Softer still, those blanket-covered skills

For sharing;

Staring by feel, and tasting eyes,
Hearing hard the tangled star
Jasmine’s rise, each night,
Under scent-swelled sky.

More importantly, I wanted all the ways anything could happen. I wanted to know I could try again, try anything, anyone could try anything again. If you lose someone, even yourself, in this life – there’s another, out beyond the canon timeline. All three of MXTX’s main couples have at least one partner who has died – sometimes multiple times.

(Try again some other life-
Time, Daoist states – red threads
Bind fate.)

It turns out it’s easier to love someone when they are dead. I feel love, now, at least part of the time. 

Around mid-winter, speaking ceased. Silence was a product of disease, of fatigue. For weeks words had been only minutes, the hurry to say “I love you” and the uncertainty of receipt. 

You – I dreamed – sometimes cried.

You, I saw,

…

I saw and –

Nothing helped. No self
Seemed left, but the pieces
Joy left, untouched.

In May, more apocalypse of green: a message. I traveled in June, and finally wrote. 

It is a difficult thing to transmute suffering into a piece. Every person has a right to their own suffering. It is unique to them, and precious, and utterly beyond Dead Dove warnings.

Yet this person I should love most – I saw some of their moments and I stole them, mined, made them mine, overlaid. I did not ask them for pictures because I know they would not have wanted any taken. But I wrote down all the words I thought to capture, notes while they slept and some while they were awake. I took skin, and the hollows where skin should have been; I took a few breaths, hard won. I took other things, without even words to match.  

For the day I meet Ammit – for the other half of the scale against my heart: I know I cried some of the time while writing. I tried not to take lightly – just the things I found irreplaceable, a careful thief. And I tried to keep my mind clear. Almost no smut. Very little, at least. 

The grief did hit around October. It was that terrible place where I know that person didn’t want to be, didn’t want to slip under – I wish stubbornness was all it took. 

(Such memory, I could bite
And maul the shape. Sometimes
I screamed at night,
Against white tiles.)

Winter again. At least this time it made sense. 

You -.

I wrote cards that day.

Sent, sent
Mailed away.

Changing sky
Iris binds, again.

It returns to this: I grieve all the time for many things – cicadas with the wings ripped off, smashed frogs; the sky; children, learning things; people who die in winter, slipping under before spring melts the river-ice. 

I think of grief as the sounds of water under ice, in a winter wood: soft, mostly, always there. And I think of crumbs and clues, scattered like crocuses in the snow. I think of the strange-starred tracks of birds, leading to the lift-off question of – somewhere else. I think of trees’ dark bark, the tannins in the leaf, the leaf before it left the tree, the tree before it framed shadows on the snow and sky. 

All of these things seem to be such an indefinite state: a lost checklist or a half-dreamed epic, a child’s dance. A look. It seems nothing is definite, certainly not something as crucial as the twinned shapes of love and grief. Their focus is not static, and neither should they be. They are held, given, mined, stolen, shared. I am always stealing or mining mine, it seems, or reshaping it into some new form to meet the surge of spring after ice melts. 

Re-shaped now, I 
And flicked my tongue to right 
The errored trees in me: a forest, 
And all space. Now,
Embrace
The scaled flight of bees, see
Cross-pollinate: the crave of
All things made and making still. Skin, 
My skin, and trees: no more
To scorch the burning page, but grow
Changing things –
This too:
Also fine.

(I’ll find 
What all you missed
And miss still) –

For now, I’ll not talk
To Eve: her bite from me 
She took.

I’ll wrap all things
In red –

(Red, for love and stubbornness
And bites took freely: the pleasure
To prick and permeate, strange bliss, or
Learn anew -)

And recreate, some day
A page that burns 

For you.