Murmurations
The bird-like words stilled and slowed - wings losing strength and structure failing. Thanks to anyone reading this for your well-intentioned patience. Writing is hard, and wonderful.
Murmurations of starlings occur as a form of protection. They structure themselves in “threateningly large, ominous shapes that make them look unapproachable,” to both predators and the world. I’m not sure if protection has ever looked so beautiful. Beyond just beauty, there is, what can be compared to magnetism: “[the] movement of a Starling only affects the movement of the closest seven surrounding birds. The closest statistical analogy is that of magnetism, where various particles align in a single direction as the metals become magnetized.”
We sat across from him in a white, sterile room. Our familiar stranger. Months of check-ups and check-ins, but knowing little of someone beyond their name and that they had a good sense of humor earned him the title of “familiar stranger.”
On this particular day, I remember his clasping hands, and the hole just beginning to show at the edge of his worn-down shoes. I remember his hands seemed heavy, his head seemed heavy. His words seemed heavy. And they were. They caved open the sterile room, swallowing us, cleaving us, with no air, with no hope, and then everything snapped shut again. He looked at us and repeated, an impossible timeline in which to say goodbye.
Her body went still, while mine was pulsing - with anger? pain? how familiar adrenaline can feel to joy. How could this familiar stranger say aloud what we’d steeled against for months? Despite the wither and the fade. There was silence for a long time, and then she spoke. Two words I could not fathom. “Thank you.”
She reached for her bag, pulling from it a printed page of Wendell Berry’s, The Peace of Wild Things. She handed it to our familiar stranger with the holes at the edges of his shoes, and a sad smile on his kindly face —
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water,
and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I can read the words upside down from where I sit, as the page tilts, as he lowers his gaze to read them too. I can imagine her mouth moving over the syllables, she’d read this poem aloud before. My eyes skate down to the furthest place that I can read, and I feel myself grasping for the words - repeating them like a silent prayer,
“despair…I wake in the night…into the peace…the day-blind stars…I rest in the grace of the world…am free.”
There they are, murmuring around me. The words strike outward, filling the sterile room, but as the familiar stranger begins to speak again, I can no longer hear him. The words are linking letters, building walls. I am alone in this room, completely separate from a world that is changing in mere seconds. I am my own murmuration.
“Not waiting for the sounds of someone was a release. And a strength.”
— Delia Owens, Where The Crawdads Sing
I take her hand as I’m speaking — marveling at this tiny moment of connection. I grasp her fingers in mine and note the ever-so-gentle murmur of a heartbeat.
She looks so small on the hospital bed, with large and starchy sheets enveloping, seemingly only bony angles.
It’s hard to hold someone’s hand while you’re reading aloud — at least in the logistical sense. But I don’t want to stop doing either. So I don’t.
It is the end of December. The cheeriest time of the year. My grandmother sent a small glass tree with us which found its way to the edge of the nurse’s station. It’s gained several ornaments since yesterday. Garlands hang in the halls, and we count them as we take our laps, wheeling her infusion drip contraption between us like a foreboding dance partner with heavy feet and jangling wires.
In a routine of this strangeness, the ending of every night surrounds the shuffling of pages and the rhythm of reading aloud. More often than not she falls asleep before I notice, and when I realize, there is some version of normalcy in my annoyance at starting chapters over again. Sometimes we read only a few, sometimes it’s pages and pages. We picked a writer whose honeyed words swim off the page and help both of us to imagine we might be anywhere else than where we are — in any other situation than the one we are in.
I feel my own voice, familiar and simultaneously strange, moving from my lungs through my throat - how certain words bump against my teeth or get lost in the mumble, the jumble of letters. I read slowly like I’m treading water. What happens when we finish the book? Can we breathe hope into existence like the threading of a plot? No point in too many questions. I just keep on holding my mother’s hand and reading, feeling my voice widen into the room, gentle against the beeps and whirs of a world we can’t keep out.
I breathe in the same air and know that if I close my eyes to rest, that she’ll be there when I open them. I know that she’ll be there.
In another world, I watch a woman’s hands hold a book in place, thumb-turning pages as she reads aloud to the man beside her. One hand is folded like a claw over the front cover, spine bared, pages curling. From where I sit you can just see the edge of her pointer finger, tracing words as she reads - he nods slowly their heads tilted close together yet voices loud enough to hear.
I can’t make out the title of the book, but I close my eyes and listen to her voice, the timbre, forming starling structures behind the black space of my eyelids. The lilt of her voice rings through like a bell, swelling and shifting until she stops.
I open my eyes, and the man is speaking, the book is closed. “What a nice ending, I didn’t remember the ending — I thought they were falling in love.” I get up from my table and leave the cafe. I leave these unfamiliar strangers to their stories.
I still marvel in that moment she said “thank you.”
I didn’t understand it at the time. Now I realize there was little else to say. The bird-like words stilled and slowed - wings losing strength and structure failing. Before they hit the floor they became swirling motes of dust in fluorescent, too-bright lighting.
Sometimes there’s nothing to protect you from the truth of your life, in loving and losing — sometimes all you can do is rest in the grace of the world, in the peace of wild things.
Dear anyone who’s reading this,
Thank you for your patience as this piece has come into its structure. I actually started a few different pieces and had the idea to combine them. How curious.
It’s been a spell, but I have been writing — in a writing class actually, new programming offered through the Los Angeles Review of Books. That’s taken much of my time and energy lately. But, I believe I’ll have much to say once I’m settled into this new routine, for now though, happy May to everyone!
XO
This is beautiful, Mila~ I can see you both, and imagine the "familiar stranger". I'm gladdened that you're doing the hard, wonderful thing. xo