Heavy Heat
Sad songs remind me of too much. Of straining caring for someone unraveling. Of people gone. Of friends facing their own slow erosion. Of feeling helpless against such ruinous tides.
So I go outside.
A porcupine lies face down next to the shed in the short grass, breathing slow and shallow in the heavy heavy heat. Headed nowhere but the end. A cloud of a thousand flies moves in stochastic patterns. I do not know how to ease its suffering. How to deter the greedy flies hellbent on rushing the timeline.
Such a painfully heavy heat.
I want so badly for the animal to be still. As though I could will it by watching: a stillness, without an intercession that breaks some part in me.
The hubris of intervention,
the helplessness of indecision.
Into the shed to consider options, hate myself for weighing implements. Back outside to escape my choices, and the porcupine has stirred. Unsteady, wavering, favoring a leg, slowly into the underbrush. Beyond the reach of my own lame suffering, a silhouette shallowly breathing, absorbed into green growth. I remember the short shallow breaths of my mother before she died. It felt like a whole lifetime—separate and crooked, branching off—before they could do anything to ease her suffering. What a fucking euphemism.
The nurses left the window open at the end.
To let her—or the idea of her—out.
The next morning the porcupine is dead beneath the lilies beside the shed.
Out here it's all a window, anyways.