act v

But this rough magic
I hear abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my books. (The Tempest, act v, scene ii, 2071-76)

I’m broken against the waves and I taste the salt water pouring past my lips, shriveling up my tongue. I hear the winds roaring all around me, caught somewhere between merry laughter and pensive tears and I want to call out to it, “It’s okay. I forgive you,” but the words have abandoned me as my phantom tongue tries to click against my teeth. I give myself to the violent seas and the storm rages overhead and I wonder where all my strength has gone. I see my grandfather sitting in the nursing home the last Saturday I went to see him and the nurse took him away just as we get there to run a test. I hadn’t seen him for a long time before that and I was angry that they were taking him away. But he was always there, sitting. He never left. It was me who never came. Where did all my strength go? Nowhere. I merely gave myself to the storm and let the water swallow me whole, captured by some heavenly music with a beat I couldn’t even follow. I listened to the angels sing and now all I want is to hear him speak. I see my grandfather lying in his hospital bed the morning of, and my sister tells me to look away but I can’t. The door is opened half-way and I see him sinking through his sheets into the shallow waters of misery. His mouth is half-opened, yet not a single word escaped him.

“When are you going overseas?” was the last thing he asked me that Saturday. He probably thought I was going to fight in a war, like his brother who died and never came back from that field in France. But he knew what he was saying when he asked me that fatal question. He would eat his dinner at the table beside me and listen, listen when I’d ramble on and on about some topic and argue with all sides. That’s how I know he knew what he was saying, because he was always listening and he knew how much going to Japan had meant to me. He heard the angels sing their heavenly music, he heard me in my childish prattle, he heard my mother’s scoldings, he heard me when I came home from school and I ran to get changed from my Catholic school uniform. He was always listening, never speaking.

I’d go downstairs into his apartment when I was young and he’d be sitting at his table with a magnifying glass trying to read the date on the back of some coin. He’d always loved coins. Our collection grew and grew until the hurricane took them all away, little flecks of silver and gold floating down the river of our street in the middle of that cold October night. When he was a boy, his father handed him one dollar when he was on his death bed. It was not the corruption of capitalism that claimed my grandfather, but the cruelty of grief that broke him against the waves. But he did not lose his strength.

Not until that fatal Monday morning.

It was raining and I found myself in school half-way through the day. I ached from the bruises of my body being tossed around by the waves and I muffled my groans beneath my medication to suppress the pain. I learned that day that pain is not something that goes away. Nothing can get the taste of saltwater out of your mouth or reclaim the words unsaid: It’s okay. I forgive you. You can only hope that someone is listening, including yourself.

Just because you say goodbye to someone, doesn’t mean that they leave you.

Christopher Michael