The one you buried answers the first night, and tells you where they truly were. A companion to Dust.
You came to me the day after I died, and before anything else I need you to know that I heard you. I heard every word. I heard the hundred things you had saved to tell me, and the sorry you said, and the way your voice broke apart on my name, and I heard you begging for it to be a dream that you would wake from. I was closer to you in that hour than I had ever been in all our years together, close enough to count your tears as they fell, and I could not answer you, and the reason I could not answer is the first thing I have to explain, because it has been undoing me to watch you kneel on that cold ground believing I was not listening.
I heard you. The living voice crosses over to us with no trouble at all. Your words reached me whole and warm. Yet no word of mine could make the crossing back the other way. I called your name. I told you I was there, I told you I was well, I laid my hand on your shoulder and pressed with everything left in me, and none of it reached you, because the door that lets your voice in will not let mine out. That is the hardest thing about these first days, and I have carried it the same as you have, standing beside you unheard while you wept over the wrong place.
Here is what I most need you to understand, the thing I would cross back through any wall to say. I am not where you think I am. You knelt over the turned earth and spoke down into it, and my dear one, I was never down there. Let me tell you where I truly was, all of it, from the very first moment, so that you can finally rise up off that floor.
It began with my last breath, though breath is the wrong word for what it became. There was a loosening. A great and strange loosening, as though a hand that had been clenched around me my whole life long finally opened. The pain I had been carrying at the end simply fell away all at once, the way a heavy coat slides from the shoulders, and I rose up out of the weight of myself as easily as steam lifts off warm water. I looked down and I saw my own body lying there, still and small and finished, and I felt no fear in it at all, only a vast and tender astonishment, because I understood in that instant that the body on the bed had only ever been the vessel, and I was the thing that had been poured into it, and I was still here, and I was more here than I had ever been in my life.
I stayed near. I need you to know that I did not rush away and leave you. I stayed, and I watched, and what I watched broke me open with love. I watched them come and tend to my body with such care that I could hardly bear it. I watched the water, and the careful hands that washed me the way a person washes something treasured, turning me, cleaning me, handling the empty shell of me with a tenderness I had never expected and was not sure I had earned. I watched them wind me in clean white cloth, layer over patient layer, until the body that had carried me for a lifetime looked like a seed made ready for the ground. And I felt the strangeness of it fully, to stand there in that room and watch my own face being washed, a face I could no longer feel from the inside, and to understand that all the love in those hands was reaching for someone who was already standing just behind them, watching, unable to reach out and say thank you.
Then I watched them carry me out into the daylight and give me over to the earth. I saw the ground open. I saw them lower the wrapped and still shape of my body down into it, and I saw you, I saw your knees fail beneath you, I saw exactly what it did to you when the first handful of earth came down. And you, who have spent your whole life with your hands buried in the earth, you of all souls were breaking because the earth was taking me, and I ached to tell you what I could see so plainly from where I stood, that the earth was only receiving back what had always belonged to it, the clay of me, the borrowed dust I was always going to return. The ground closed over the body, and I stood beside you the whole time, closer than the earth, closer than your own sorrow, with my hand on a shoulder that could not feel it rest there.
And through these seven nights since, while you have lain awake picturing me alone and cold beneath the ground, I have been somewhere else entirely, warm, and held, and carried. I have almost no words for this part, and you will have to forgive the smallness of the ones I own. On that first night something lifted me. Something vast and unbearably kind gathered me up the way you would lift a sleeping child from a chair, and it has been carrying me ever since, one night into the next, further from the ground with each one. It has been showing me things. I have been carried through a stillness so deep and so alive that it seemed to hum. I have been shown places I have no names for and colors that do not exist where you are. And somewhere in the carrying I was asked a question, though not in any words, a question that reached all the way down into the floor of me and asked, with no cruelty in it, only a great tenderness, who I had loved, and what I had done with the life I had been lent. I answered with the whole of myself, because in that place a soul has lost the ability to lie, and whatever I truly was, was simply seen, and I was carried onward still.
I cannot tell you all of it tonight. There is so much more, about where they have been carrying me, and what I have been shown, and what I am only beginning to understand, but the rest of the telling will have to wait until you come to me again, because even reaching across with this much has taken a great and patient effort. Tonight the seventh day is arriving, and I can feel you making your slow way back toward the earth to look for me once more, and I have paused in the middle of my journey only to press this into whatever will carry it to you.
Know this much, and let it be enough to lift you up. I am not where you think I am. The ground you keep kneeling on holds the coat I set down, the vessel I was poured from, the handful of dust I was always meant to give back. It does not hold me. I have been carried somewhere I could never describe to you and would not return from even if the way back were opened, and I am well, and I am held, and I am nearer to you right now than the cold earth you have been speaking into.
Rise up, and rest. Wash your face. Sleep one whole night through. And when you come to me on the seventh day, come knowing that you are speaking to me, and that I am listening to every word, and that one day, in a place with no more walls, the door will open both ways at last, and I will finally answer you out loud, the way I have been aching to since the first night you knelt and could not hear me saying, over and over, I am here, I am here, I am here.
such knowing … how did you know this?