What's Buried

We dug the hole together. It was a trench really, like the space between us.

As friends, we’d been so close. As partners, we tight-roped above love and hate amidst winds so forceful we’d often slip off, from one side to the other.

You said that you needed me now though, so I am here.

For a moment I lay my hand on yours, which lays on top of Mika’s thin matted fur. Through you, I can feel her body, cool and stiff, and I feel that way too.

This is how my body responds in emergencies: efficient, swift, detached.

My wiring was first laid down in chaos. Now, in crisis I am unflappable. If I had the insight to resent it, perhaps I would, expending too much energy longing for new circuitry. Instead, I marvel at my potential in the face of a zombie apocalypse, or now, when an old dog needs to be buried and your heart is breaking.

Your heart is breaking and I did not want that. I did not want her to die, or you to weep, or for your grief to permeate my own open heart.

I preferred our coolness.

And yet, as we shovel piles of dirt away from us onto a heap of the side of the yard I cannot help but feel it; the jagged edges of the shovel may as well be cutting into your cardiac muscle and I am so sorry. I am sorry for this heat of loss and the fire of love that preceded it.

Each scoop of dirt is an apology:

I am sorry she is gone.

I am sorry you feel alone.

I am sorry we are here like this.

I am sorry.

I am sorry.

I’m sorry.

As I speak silent apologies I wonder if this grave will ever be deep enough.

I wonder if you are right to bury her here in the rented yard, and whether I am right to help you. I dig anyway. What I lack in answers or comfort, I will simply make up to you in labor, pressing the heavy metal shovel down into the dirt with my foot while looking over at her.

My palms begin to blister.

Mika lays to our left. Her straight rigid limbs and her glassy eyes are startling juxtapositions to her remembered aliveness, and for a moment I imagine how she must have looked when she first bounded into your arms: all fur and youth and companionship.

She was just a puppy in the photos you’d shown me, when we were friends.

Now that we are lovers, I miss you. Not a lifetime worth, like you’d had with her, but genuinely. I easily would have traded our flash flood of lust for a longer, drier season of connection.

Sex is never the salve for loneliness I expect it to be.

For now though, the hole is deepening, and I wish that we could bury the drama of our romance here with her too, but it wouldn’t be right.

This is your ceremony, her grave, and I am only here to dig.