X: Elegy | Uncomposed: "Shrine to July"
I decided long ago to give a false name at the coffee shop counter. My real one offered too many chances to cringe: song of wine and lemons that my mother plucked from her father’s country, here crunched into nasal vowels. So, I picked yours: four letters that no one could possibly mispronounce. Strange premonition, long before I met you. For years, when we got coffee together, sometimes there would be two cups scrawled with the same name. Force of habit. Other times I found a different one by seconds. Always a flower. We’d laugh about it, the garden girls and their teabags.
Now I have to stop myself when they ask. Force myself out of habit. In the places that are becoming haunts, I’m starting to give my own name. But sometimes I’m the haunted—not quick enough, and it slips out. Burns a hole in my throat, ash and char.
You haven’t died, but sometimes pieces of you still smolder as if you did.
/
The magnolias bloomed in New York the week the world ended. (Yours, not mine.) I would gather fallen petals walking back to the apartment; by the time I reached the door, their peachy flesh was bruised. This was the silence between you and I: months of slow injury, a message or an Instagram post keeping me sore, tender to the touch. (No one ever taught me how to mourn 15 years of friendship. Ice cream and drunken nights don’t reach deep enough to exorcise this.)
You broke the first piece of bad news to two of us in a text. (I was amazed to be one of them, radio signal crackling over the distance after five months of dead air.) I was walking through the park, fruit-ripe and bursting. I thought of the trees on Marlborough, ached sharply for home (for you).
Can you please tell everyone else, I just don’t have the energy to do this over and over, you wrote. I scrambled to do the one thing I could. Wounded as I was, my first grudge was still a cosmic one, that this had happened to you.
Only days later, the final blow landed. I found out about the memorial online. I almost did it then—could have caught the train uptown, then the Amtrak, then a car, all the way to you. Like the songs I listened to at 14, all riffs and desperation, drums and bravado.
I didn’t. We were too fractured, and it was too far, and pop punk only works for third-act rom-com reunion scenes. (Maybe I thought coming to your door would mean forgiveness for us both. Maybe that was the problem.)
/
My father and I are humming to Norwegian Wood in the car when I realize I’ve forgotten your favorite Fab Four album. For a moment, the sitar pulls too hard at my ears, sours. This is part of it: the dulling of things I used to know about you.
My father is still singing, but I’m silently cataloguing. Irish Breakfast, not English. Your shoe size. The way you laugh with your tongue caught between your teeth. Part of me sees these things as hard evidence. (I shouldn’t want to prove it anymore, but I had to, didn’t I, put on trial over and over. Habit is a stubborn sacrifice.)
I want to seize the details back, keep them out of direct sunlight. I want the knowledge of you to seep out all at once, a Lethean baptism, leaving no trace.
/
This is not supposed to happen to you. I could hear my heart shake in my mouth. Stared at your words on my phone, gut churning. I was in my mother’s kitchen, her chatter turning incoherent in my ears. The glass in my hand felt too cold, rigid. This only happens on TV.
An ocean roiled between my temples as I typed back what I could, which was not much. God, my love, I’m so sorry. This isn’t fair. Let me know what you need. I love you so, so much.
I hardly spoke at dinner. All night, I thought about driving from my mother’s house to yours, twenty minutes, tops. I was burning, desperate to offer something. I had a vision of you in the garden—on your knees between the salvias and daisies, animal-howling into the dark, alone, alone. But it was the first pandemic summer; I didn’t have my license, didn’t want to overstep. You were never someone for surprises. (Maybe you still aren’t. Maybe I should have shown up anyway, burning skid of tires. Maybe this was the problem.)
With July breathing hot on my neck, I started writing. Something to excavate the horror and rage from the cavern of my chest. Between scratched-out lines, I went out into the yard and screamed. Throat raw, birds taking off in the trees. I wrote and screamed and wrote: I’d stand in your yard / asking God to take a bribe. I was praying the only way I knew how. I was trying to build a boat, to take me through the waves of grief on your street, right up to your door.
/
I am dreaming about you again, which means I am trying not to think about you. I am trying not to think about you, which means I think about you all the time.
The winter I was 15, my mother lost her mother, and my father his father. The grief hung like fog, low and thick, in both houses. I remember the way each grandparent ghosted their child in their sleep: He came to see me last night. She was there, but she wouldn’t speak, only smiled. These were sacred visitations. I turned reverent, seeing my parents reclaim something.
Sometimes the dream is you and I in the same crowded room, not speaking. Sometimes it’s you, repentant, in tears. Sometimes I’m the one crying, and you gone cold. But sometimes it’s us, nothing more than a glance for apology, my hair in your face and your head under my chin. It’s bergamot and acrylic on your fingers and thank god thank god I missed you.
But you’re alive, so I don’t know which one to believe. I don’t know which version of you is the impostor. I don’t know how to grieve someone whose number I can still dial. There is nothing sacred about a wound that can’t close on its own.
/
It was spare in your high-boned dorm room, but you did what you could: garlands over the desk, postcards in the window. It was winter. The light fell hard and fast across your eyes, their blue transparent, as I opened my laptop to show you a song. I had never heard anything like this singer, voice whiskeyed and thrumming, and I needed you to.
Six winters from this moment, we finally saw him onstage. It was a difficult weekend, shadowed by the pain making a home in my body. The day you arrived I inexplicably lost my voice. That night I tripped into panic, and you took me to urgent care without complaint. You sat quietly while they drew my blood, waited the needling minutes until they told me I wasn’t dying. You did not call me unreasonable or overreacting.
At the show the next night, you let me stand near the wall so I could crouch when my spine burned. You sang, loud and unadorned—because you were blooming, finally being there. Maybe a little because you knew I couldn’t, and you knew it killed me. Our muse sang about creatures from the deep and love like a bruise, his voice shaking loose something in my chest. We grinned at each other, your face opening into gold, your eyes blue neon in the stage light.
But here, now, in your dorm room, I pressed play; we went quiet as the song rose. I was in it, I was watching you. You were curious, reverence unfolding your brow. Wow, you said when it was over. Oh, wow. I shone. (I always wanted your approval. Maybe this was the problem.)
/
In my head is an endless procession of hospital visits and funerals. Sometimes I am the attending, quiet at the bedside, the graveside. Sometimes the funeral is mine. I know what my brain is doing—taking the road to learn how the wheel feels in my hands, bracing for impact. Learning grief before it comes to live in my body, song piped in on tinny speakers.
I think about how many drafts of that first careful text I wrote before you read it. How part of me knew already that I was rehearsing an ending. Flowers in my hand at the cemetery. I knew I would lose something; I just didn’t know how much.
I’m so angry, you wrote in that first furious rush of replies. There’s plenty you’ve done that I’ve never brought up. I’ve replayed that argument so much it grates. Too much bass in the speakers, too much I let you say, that I said wrong.
Anger is the second of the five stages of grief. For me, it’s the only one. I am angry at you, and then stricken. (Guilt like drawn blood; I can’t look at the needle.) Angry at myself. (Guilt like tannins filling my mouth.) Angry that I’ve been taught not to feel anger at all, when I know it now to be an alarm: Too far.
/
The summer we turned 18, the last days of hometown August became precious, vestiges of honey at the bottom of the jar. We were sprawled in someone’s backyard, raucous and tender. You were leaving for college in the morning. In a group of a dozen, we spent most of the evening within six inches of each other.
When you finally got up, something in me cracked like varnish. I cried, unabashed by my own crumbling. Our friends cooed at me as you drove away. I did not know, at this juncture, how to let go. (Photos in my phone, birthday cards in my drawer, paintings in my basement: I still don’t.)
Do you still have the Stevens cover? I remember how quickly I found the song I needed that night, how simply it came together—my voice warm in the mic, my nails buffed on the strings. If you wanna leave, take good care. I always imagined you listening to it on the drive west—if I couldn’t go with you, at least my voice could. Something known in a new place, a song as broken in as favorite boots. I wanted to be that for you.
When we were first writing our applications, we had some in common. Wouldn’t it be funny if we went to the same school? I had laughed. You hadn’t. Only pursed your lips: No, I don’t think that would be a good idea. I had swallowed and shrunk, chastised. (It would not be the last time.) Of course, a stupid idea, time apart to grow is good. (Maybe I dug my nails in too tight and you felt the marks. Maybe this was the problem.)
/
Most of the time I don’t talk about you. Burning building in my chest. At first, the smoke had edges; it filled whatever room I was in. I choked around it with our friends. They don’t ask, because I asked them not to, but I know they wonder what broke.
I can stomach it better now, but every so often it’ll rile me to a fever, shaking. I have never hated Facebook Memories more. I didn’t realize that all these years, I was building a shrine. The shape of your face, the color of your scarf—yes, I remember this song, but it’s not quite right. Bootleg version, bad cover. I don’t want it in my head.
My therapist says, “If I could take one thing from you and hold it—and maybe never give it back—it would be your guilt.”
Oh, but that one’s by heart. Hard to unlearn.
/
I have been back for a month. Text you some longer version of: I’m home. Want to talk?
And for the first time in months, the possibility of yielding: Yes. Okay.
The waiting makes a refuge in my sternum, sinks into the tissues of my body. Becomes a melody underlying everything: I walk the river and think of your red gingham picnic blanket. I pass your train stop and pray to see you, pray not to see you. The moon shrinks, slivers, swells again. I wait so faithfully I almost forget about the hope and hurt in my blood stretching me thin, the way my ribs are slowly breaking through skin.
It’s the end of July; we text each other happy birthday days apart. I see it as offering, as prayer—until I ask again. I’m not actually ready for this, you write. My throat closes, tongue coated bitter, no words. Why am I disappointed? Why did I expect this to end any differently—slow fade of a ‘60s record, vocals turning ghostly on the track until silence falls?
Let’s check in, you write. I trust we’ll make it back to each other someday. Loyalty strains in my fingers, reaching. (I was taught to fight for things. I don’t walk away.) I want to say yes. Want to just give you what you want, white flag.
Let’s check in. But I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to talk around the soot in my throat, dole out mundane updates as if nothing has happened, as if the room isn’t filled with smoke. I don’t know how to live in a house with a basement that keeps flooding, water at my calves, rot underneath. I don’t know how I can keep betraying myself, over and over.
So I don’t. And I tell you so. I send you the song from the July before this one, the one I screamed in my yard to write. (Do you still howl at night? Does it still hurt as much as it did?) By now it’s a weak defense, look, this was how I felt, I cared, I did.
Maybe I should have sent it sooner. Maybe this was the problem. I drag myself to your altar over and over, knees bloody.
/
I will always remember my first time in your house, strange split between ease and trespass. I was a wary creature picking my way around, ready to bolt. But the same health-store breakfast cereals stood in your cabinets; the same stacks of teabags filled the counter. After dinner, we sprawled on the rug with mugs in hand, your parents’ records on the floor. Even the music sounded worn-in, edgeless, an extra layer of warmth.
You were still sleeping in bunks then. That was comforting; I’d been climbing a ladder to bed since I was eight. Eventually we drifted into the bottom bunk, talking shoulder-to-shoulder under a sky of candy-bright stickers melded irrevocably with the woodgrain.
You fell asleep first. I turned to the window—slowly, not to wake you—and listened. I grew up next to a hospital, lulled by a choir of ambulances and car alarms. But here: spring wind in your neighbors’ hedges. The pulse of your breath, steady. A new song, strange and soothing. New, and somehow recognizable, something calling to the marrow in me. Like I had been waiting for your melody all my life.
I slept heavy that night—a rarity, then and still. My body saying to me, You are safe here. And that was you. That was you.
(Uncomposed is a column by Paola Bennet about the music in the moments we don’t think to look for it: woven into the fabric of a life, steady and simple as breath. This column, along with two more by the HM team and dozens more pieces of art, music, and writing by contributors, is published in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue X: Elegy. It is available for preorder now.)