What The Body Keeps Without Being Asked
by Kiernan515
There is a quality of light in late October
that the body recognizes
before the mind does,
a thinning, a specific gold
that falls across linoleum
and window ledges
and the backs of hands
held still for a moment
over a sink,
and something ancient in the sternum
stirs,
the way a dog lifts its head
in the direction of a sound
no human caught,
the way a wound knows weather.
I have stood in that light
a hundred Octobers
and felt the same vast ache
move through me
like a ship through fog,
dragging a sound behind it
that my body mistook for memory,
unhurried, enormous,
unconcerned
with whether I am ready
or finished
or pretending to be.
I have rehearsed forgetting this.
The Greeks had a word for it.
Several, probably.
They were always naming the unnameable,
pressing syllables against the dark
like a hand against a wound.
They believed naming something
made it smaller.
I suspect it did not help.
I don't have their word.
I have the light.
I have the sternum.
I have the standing at the sink,
holding the last of the day
like a mouth holding water
it won’t swallow.
I have, also, my phone,
which I picked up
in the middle of all that vastness
because your name came up
as a Suggested Contact
in my Venmo app,
which means the algorithm
knows I owe you something,
or you owe me something,
or we owe each other
a reckoning
and
it’s trying to process it
as a transaction,
which means even now
we are being calculated
into something that can be settled,
flattened
into a number
I could press my thumb against
and make disappear.
Seven dollars.
Suggested.
For what.
I stood in the October light
with the Greeks and my sternum
and the ancient ache
and a push notification
that said
you two have history,
as if that were the smallest part of it.
I remember it differently
depending on who I need to be,
I edited it
until I could live with it,
And yes.
I had almost
let the fog take it,
which is the closest
I’ve come to calling it peace.