A woman wakes up alone in her Museum of Heartbreak.
She is — in a meteoric daily rise — chief curator here.
Year one: she reels. She dreams. Everyone understands. They bring dinner.
Year two. Fewer visits. Dinners alone.
The dog. Her loyal tear-stained dog.
Her adult children press her to abandon curation. The job is too much. It is also an internship.
Her ex (ugh, that word) has “moved on.” Her friends listen to her, wondering, waiting.
Too much time somehow passes; someone is measuring.
She notices that her curatorial vision is beginning to make even her friends uncomfortable.
It is grief, she knows.
Grief, however/whenever it manifests, has an ethical composition!
Go to therapy, they text. Read this book.
Some ask, with a tilt that makes her shake with rage, What will one woman do with such a large house?
And they aren’t wrong. This is the terrible part.
But the curator does not break. She gathers what’s broken inside.
She holds what is historical and discards what is dross. It is her work.
She convinces no one.
Reality keeps knocking, asking to be met.
She can’t disperse herself like seed or dust. (Who can?)
She tells Reality: I wait for him to see his error. I home-keep. I love here.
“Open the door,” Reality says in its plain sunlit voice. “Walk out to me.”
Something coils inside the house. It fattens and changes and starves.
She lives out her days in the coil and dies.
No.
It doesn’t end like this.
One day two women knock on her door. Two friends or sirens. They ask her to tea.
Tea seems safe enough. But they don’t drive to the tea house; they drive to the desert.
Let me text my kids. Her phone dies.
She is angry at the campsite.
She throws a rock as far as she can. This hurts.
She throws another rock.
This sky is too large to hold anything. The ground is rock and ground-down rock.
The day goes.
She wants to slap one friend and hug the other and then burrow in the one she slapped and slap the one she hugged.
I know what you are doing. She does not scream.
They build a fire. They hand her a mug of tea and secure a blanket around her shoulders. Ha-ha, it falls.
Neither the mug nor the blanket are part of her museum. She notices.
(In truth her friends don’t know what they are doing and are afraid. The only plan was to let the desert be itself.)
Night rises from the hard blue ground.
She can’t tell a woman from a cactus in the dark.
There is no child, no god, no podcast.
No horror bordering a recipe for pecan pie in the fucking New York Times.
No aphorism or screen for her pain.
Her children are gone, rooting for her, living their lives.
The sky is a scatter of stars.
She cries until she doesn’t.
Her friends take turns holding her hand and falling asleep.
There is a coyote and it has wisdom and it takes a shit somewhere.
She thinks: Fuck wisdom.
She thinks as the fire dwindles: I will burn the ghost of our love.
She sings: I will carry the ghost of our love.*
The curator remembers:
She told her friends, in the wildness of her grief, to stop pushing her to progress.
And they left her to it.
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for my friends who waited for me to see
and for my friend in the desert
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