B U R Y I N G

The sun has set. The spoon dripped honey. I let it pool on my tongue and it slid down my throat. It was thick and felt hot as it pooled, a sweetness beyond sugar, beyond gold.

Honey soothed me. It warmed my cold edges, the slick knives that she would twirl in my chest. It had been a long day. This honey was my currency, what I would softly trade with my heart to soothe.

My anxiety sat by my shoulder, quiet now. She came and went, one day to another. Mostly there, tracing her fingers up and down my throat. Sometimes she’d slip them slowly around my neck, climb through my lips and down toward my ribs. There, she’d lie sideways, curling and uncurling, plaiting strips of glass between my lungs. After she finished her work, I’d be carved and exhausted. So—I eat honey. The honey drowned her in syrup, alchemy turned her gold. She’d still, then wait for tomorrow.

I bring the spoon with me to the back door. It creaks as I push it open—the stone outside is cool on my toes. There’s a fog sneaking down the street, I can see it over the garden gate.

The moon should be full tonight, but no glow through the clouds. Tonight’s will be the Thunder Moon, named for the summer storms that crash by in July. The moist, sweet air is thick, freshening after the sun’s heat. As it rises up to the cooler air above, it becomes unstable, they say. This brings me my storms, my Thunder. I feel myself in that volatility. I too—or should I say we too, my anxiety and I—that’s where we are. We sit at the edge of a storm. We evaporate, we condense, we fall apart in showers of grief at who we are (and who we’ve been). I dream of losing her in one of those storms. I dream of her drowning, or killing her quietly with my pocketknife in a cloud. Of slicing her cleanly in two or three pieces. It hasn’t worked yet.

Tonight—while the moon hides her face and the fog comes closer—tonight comes my violence.

It will be a heavy killing, keep her down and gone from my mind. I’m going to bury her.

I’d gotten the idea from a small, moldy book I found in our new house. In a dark corner of the basement was a door to the old coal room. Its floors were dirt, stone walls. Not a breath of air, cold and still. On a ledge was the book. It was black, though the leather had greened from the humidity. It was blank inside, thin lines empty.

Empty, except:

“I, the half-mad mourner of buried days,” it read.

And a name. Anna Akhmatova.

The tragic queen of Russian poetry, Modigliani’s nude.

There was no reason for it to rest there, in my coal room. I guess it liked the dark.

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I can’t help but bemoan the time my anxiety has taken from me. All the moments that could have been my own—moments of peace, lush with nothing in particular, a peach-coloured plan. But there she always came, creeping beside me. My anxiety, she drapes me in garlands of dread. Before I even named her, she took my hours and threw them in a sorrow sea.

But tonight, tonight with the Thunder Moon holding my heart, I let out my new friend—my half-madness—to try their hand. In this darkness, my madness and I, we push her under.

The cool garden stones are edged with moss. The vegetable patch lies just beyond. I step forward. It’s just my notebook, my shovel, my madness and me. The anxiety still sleeps in honey.

I start turning up the soil in the furthest corner. The carrots grow here, the beets too. I’ll dig to their depth and past, carving a small, deep hole from the earth. The soil eases my soles, it holds my feet. I imagine the earth pushing up against me, holding me up as I deliver my anxiety down to the dark. She lies quietly at the bottom of the hole. Her throat is full with sugar and earth, as I begin to fill in.

Faster now I shovel. My mind blanks, my madness takes me to my knees, and I use my hands, pushing down layers of earth. Silence, still. The fog slides over my shoulders, my hair is damp.

All I know is fear, my sweating skin, my dark hours. All her gifts. I hope (too mild a word) I buried them with her. I leave her now with the weight of the earth and a few drops of blood. I cut my hand as I dug.

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The Harvest Moon hangs high.

The heat has been heavy. The days, long. I’ve lived quietly, my madness and I, but we haven’t yet grieved. My anxiety, my dear, my sweet, my terror. She’s buried in these months as the moon comes and goes. My beloved moon has kept my secret. My madness too, they speaks of no murder.

It’s time to dig. She’s been waiting in the earth. Has death become her? Exhume for answers, I hope (too weak a word).

I go deeper, deeper down. There, at the bottom of my hole is a small bundle. It is of faded, soiled green velvet, wrapped tightly in twine. I did not dress her body when I buried her. A piece of my soul has lied here with her, perhaps it is the one who has wrapped her in shroud.

I lift the cloth, and its weight surprises me. I smell decay.

I unwrap the cloth, it falls and I kneel.

I harvest her for the moon.

There she lies on the ground. She’s taken solid form, so long a vesper in my life.

She catches a slip of light from somewhere in the night. She’s now cold and hard and deep ruby red.

I whisper Horace’s ode, “Exegi monumentum aere perennius.” (I erected a monument more solid than bronze). A monument the soil and I have a crafted in her tomb, my vegetable garden mausoleum. The tomatoes split, the lettuce wilts. I hold her weight in my hands.

The moon sets.

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I’ve sold her now, this gem. Someone called it a ruby and paid me $20,000 for my harvest. A price for my sorrow, a price for her death. She’s gone. I hope—(too desperate a word).

“Then helplessly my breast grew cold, / But my steps were light.”

-from Anna Akhmatova’s “The Song of the Last Meeting,” 1990