I. Dear Siri, it’s me Margaret. I can’t sleep unless I video call myself: pixel sleep’s-head, soft and distorted, tense-eyed. It’s been nine months and I sleep with the lights on. It’s not really sleep, my eyes feel like vinegar. I need to see behind me. I need somebody to see me. I’m afraid to sleep alone.
Dear Google, can you hear my grief? I’m in the back booth of Panera. This is where you always ate lunch. Angel-hair pawsta. That’s how you’d say it. I had never been before and never looked them up or said their name. But every day I get Instagram ads for Panera, every day since you’ve been away.
Google Maps, open home, street view please.
The dog has his nose up against the wet wooden fence, the paper is still wrapped at the end of the driveway. The house, panelled in cloudless blue, has all the windows shut. Your car, shiny and burgundy, is parked by the side of the house. I wait in stillness on the other side of the screen—at any minute you will run down, pet the dog, slide into the car in your plaid shoes, drive to work, give me a call. It is 2018 and you are still alive. There you go, a shadow skipping across a buttercream room. I wait, but the door stays closed.
Dear Google, please never go back to that house. You can close the map now.
II. Dear Siri, please turn off the alarm. Waking up tears me apart again. I slide off the bed and the sun hitting my skin tears me apart again. The light casts unreality across the room and it tears me apart again. I sit on the bus and listen to you make me feel like I am home again and it tears me apart again. I was afraid to hear that song again but couldn’t stop myself again.
Siri, define rupture. Never mind, I’ll tell you. You were a rupture. To rupture, as in: the ball of an excitable child underneath a subway train’s track, like the unfinished track of my shower door ruptured a long lash of flesh across my sole on the way out, the way the nuclear pipe ruptured the suburban earth of my yard and we all had to swallow iodine twice a day. The new shock of sameness without your air terrifies.
III. Google search: should I call 911? What are the symptoms of losing your mind? Dear Google I have already lost. I have lost so much. I have not read your last note to me. I imagine the words read the way an old telephone shrieks a sleeping Sunday family awake—a wrong number, a wrong continent, a sleep, a dream, ruptured, feathered, evaporated, gone—rib to rib, lung to lung, splitting like a tangerine in high summer; the rind is worn, the pith wanes.
Last night I was sleepwalking and carrying a wet towel in my arms like a limp corpse, a swaddled baby, I awoke with no idea how the towel got so wet. In the sick dark I pulled through thick embryonic fluid.
You were on the other side of the bank where it is always childhood. Sometimes I get close enough to feel the breeze of wanton schoolless evenings. I can’t see across the infinity of child-time anymore. I see only the bronze of your curls, light trapped in the bends.
I meet you only in dreams now; in my dream you are in cornflower blue. I realize then that your hair is long, tied back. I run my fingers through it and cry. I can’t feel it. It doesn’t catch in the split of my nail. It doesn’t leave strands around my fingers. And I howl. It’s me. Everyone in my dreams is me.
I turn away and evaporate before I see how much distance there is between us now. And how do I measure that distance? Before it was 842.1 km. Now you are nine months and twenty days in the past. Now you are 28. You will always be. What did you do on that last day? Did you listen to your favourite songs?
IV. Dear Google, you’re a graveyard. I can’t search your name. Alive, temple to temple with your cat on Instagram, an unfinished screenplay on your blog, a Facebook post about the weather in South Carolina, two summers ago. How do I pull you out from there? Materialize—I am electrocuting myself again, I am $3000 deep into a cracked MacBook screen again, I am taking apart the phone screen glass again, I am green circuit boards and gold memory chips and the buzz of static on the other end—nothing again.
Grief is a thing with thorns. There’s a chicken bone stuck in my throat. Where are your glasses? Where are your glasses? I cannot say read write the word d*ath. As if doing so brings it, summons it, to l*fe. I know passing is a euphemism. This poem is not a summoning spell—for d*ath or for you. This poem feels like a black hole but it is not. This is a study in living in the wake of s*icide. This is a question: will I vanish too?
You are not in this poem. Instead, the poem is written in moving space, the snow on the concrete slushes and drains. Google collects more of me, no more of you. The birds pick the lawn again. The people in this poem grow older. They grow old as they write this poem, as they read this poem. The people in this poem sleep between nightmares. All night long I am growing, I wake up with knees aching from running and falling, running and falling, and growing and changing.
When I taste the sea breeze in mild summer, pick blackberries from the neighbour’s bush, bake focaccia with bitter olives, sleep on a towel under the sun, sit by the rushing brook—whom should I blame? Of whom should I be afraid? Because it all feels wrong, and I am afraid.
You are in possession of one half of a song whose other half is in my keeping. You have taken it to where I do not know, and I sing your half until I forget my own.
Vomiting from my stupid heart. I do another load of laundry in salt water. The machine never runs empty anymore. Nasal cavity to eyelid to tear duct, fresh from my guts, from my flesh. If I should be ruined, let it be by you. The wound is deep my love, but if it is the price I pay so you no longer suffer, I will pay. I will pay, I will pay, I pay.
Yasmina Jaksic is a Chinese-Serbian writer and PhD candidate at York University in Toronto. She has previously won the Alice Munro Short Story Award, the Kenneth G. Mills Poetry Award, and was recently shortlisted for the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Her work can be found in Sine Theta Magazine.