bulls in a china shop.

when twins are in the womb & one of them is born- sara remembered hearing once- the twin who remains behind watches his sole companion vanish & suffers an agony almost too devastating to bear. only a moment later, he will understand that his twin has not died, but quite the opposite, that his vanished friend is closer to him than he could know. this, according to a story that sara once heard, is also the way of real death & the world to come. just because we think people have disappeared doesn’t mean they have. they are closer than we think.
vanished people were a breath away. one only needed to breathe.

when he finally fell asleep, his dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body & the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, & worst of all the bottomless pit of truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife after all, but simply this world, to come- the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.

after the wedding, drunk but not that drunk, button lay arms-out across the bed. his tie dangled from from one hand, & he wasn’t surprised to feel it tugged at & then suddenly hauled away. the cat. he closed he hand. yes, it was empty. he closed his eyes & opened his hand; then he closed his hand again & opened his eyes. amazing the way a person is wired. he didn’t need to look to know his hand was open. that the tie was long gone. button watched the ceiling fan & loved it for turning so slowly. obviously in such slow motion it was intended only for his use for these few minutes. he worked one dress shoe off with the other, and then held it on his toe as long as he could. the air cooled his arch perfectly, & he thought that: perfect. evaporation was such a stunning feature of life on earth. water rises into the air. now he opening his mouth & then a little wider than it was comfortable. he tried to look, but he couldn’t see. he knew his mouth was wide open. button watched one blade of the fan take & lose a shadow as it rotated, & he wondered if opening your mouth helped you think. it seemed to be helping him. his mind was clear. he decided to feed it a thought. his daughter was married. he’d witnessed the event this afternoon as sharon left his arm & accepted a ring. button decided to try another thought: she was now halfway across dearden bay on the way to the old dearden lodge. she’d be wearing her michigan state sweatshirt & jeans, & she & larry would be leaning on the rail of the ferry’s upper deck, bumping heads & talking about the lesser constellations far over canada. button opened his mouth a little wider; he was really thinking. & this mouth thing helped him from being sad. he wasn’t sad. he was something, which was similar to sad, but his mouth & the fan & the cat & his hand & the tie, wherever it was, had helped him avoid real sadness.