Listening to the Wind Like a Dry Ocean Outside My Window by Gail Hosking
Sounds? There are so few these days in my third-floor apartment overlooking an urban parking lot, unless you count the garbage truck on Tuesday mornings, or water passing through the upstairs pipes, or the heat coming on. In the summer there might be a party across the street outside Selena’s Restaurant with twinkle lights and margaritas. Inside, I keep my radio on, partly for Frieda, my cat, so she doesn’t feel alone when I leave. Mostly, though, for myself, so I remember there are other human beings out there in the world. Otherwise, I must admit, it’s difficult to be alone. Frieda reminds me we are in this together as she greets me at the door or jumps on my bed to curl up next to me and stares with her big green eyes or cleans her body with her long sticky tongue. When I sit down on the couch, she joins me and stretches out her legs to touch my chest with her soft paws. “Did David send you?” I ask, David being my partner who passed away a few months ago. If he were to send me a cat for company, Frieda would be the one. Sweet and loving. Easy. Responsive. Like him.
My life has been eroded of late with his loss, an unsettling and sudden turn. I feel without direction or certainty. Raw and vulnerable. Out of sorts. In a fog. Mournful. Call it what you will. What is left is unrecognizable. Dusk to dawn. Morning to night. Oceans and seasons to cross without him. Paths I can’t imagine yet.
Sometimes I hear myself talking to David, telling him about my days, my plans. I want to run everything by him like the old days. Recently, when his daughter and family arrived for a visit, I asked him to hold my hand, and I found myself reaching out, squeezing my fist around an invisible hand that stayed with me the entire visit like a secret in the room. David’s hidden presence and their voices felt joyful. When they left, another wave of dark sorrow filled the apartment.
I reached out on the phone then, or on paper to keep myself sane. I wrote blessings for the mundane and the mysterious things of my life, like the time I wrote about the incense I’d lit for no other reason than to fill the air with a meditative aroma of spirit. The smell changed the air for a while on that difficult night as I tried my best to hold steady with my hand on my heart. I blessed the way I tried to cry but couldn’t. No sound would come out as I looked upward, open-mouthed in the dark.
I need to acknowledge my grief, my disorientation, my inability to get out of bed some mornings, remembering the feel of his skin, his blue eyes, the songs he sang. I am, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, a deck of cards thrown into the air. It takes courage to go on despite that low feeling in the middle of my chest. He is not coming back, and that thought alone moves me to tears. I bless the mystery of where he has gone, the question that never offers an answer, or even comfort, on gray days.
Memories, of course, help. People keep saying, “At least you have those.” How can one disagree with that? Yes yes yes. But but. Still. I bless the silence of the nights when I cannot find words, no way in and no way out. I move on, though that’s not the right phrase, and as I do, I hear my feet trying so hard to walk to the market if only to see friends, drink coffee in a crowd and listen to music and people buying apples and eggs. I bless the doors that have closed, the future ones to open that I can’t see yet. I bless the ache in my body, faithful like the dawn as I listen to the pipes knocking and the fierce wind blowing outside my window.
Artist’s Statement
Much of my writing involves loss and its aftermath, mainly because there’s been so much of it in my life with war, illness, and early deaths. I come at it from many angles, different situations, and genres. When my sister asks why I don’t write about more happy subjects, I tell her I am a happy person, just one obsessed with unhappy subjects. I write as a witness. I write to understand. I write to put fragments back together.
Raised an army brat with twelve schools in twelve years, Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter: The Roads in and Out of War; as well as three books of poems—The Tug, Retrieval, and Adieu. Essays and poems have been published in such places as South Dakota Review, Upstreet, Post Road, terrain.org, Lillith Magazine, Chattahoochee Review, Fourth Genre and Reed Magazine. Several pieces have been anthologized. and she’s received several Pushcart nominations and has twice been referred to as “most notable” in Best American Essays. With her MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars, she taught at Rochester Institute of Technology for over ten years. She’s just finished a memoir about her mother and military life. At the moment, it’s floating out there in the world somewhere looking for a publisher.