Something Wonderful

“At rehab, they asked us to rehearse our own vanishing.”

A dear friend and stern mentor who doesn’t suffer any excuses from me, no matter how plausible, sent me this poem. Thank you, K.

At rehab, they asked us to rehearse our own vanishing.

Not metaphorically.
Not in the way people say,
I’m dying
when the barista forgets the oat milk.

They meant:
close your eyes
and imagine the world
continuing without you animated within it.

Imagine your breath
getting its eviction notice.

Imagine your body
becoming something people speak about
with the careful grammar of gone.

Imagine yourself
as a photograph on a mantle,
a smile trapped behind glass,
a rumor still wearing your shoes,
a sweatshirt folded in the back of a drawer
because grief has no idea
what to do with its hands
except hold on
to the shape you used to make in cotton.

Then they said:

Write the truth
that will stay
when you no longer can.

Do not write about the passwords.
Do not write about the bank account.
Do not write about who gets the car,
the paintings,
the cheap blue mug
you kept for no good reason
except it fit your hand
like a small country
that had never asked you to leave.

Write the thing behind all those things.

Write what you refuse
to disappear
without saying.

So I wrote this:

If I have one ask
of everyone I have ever loved,
one last flare
thrown from the burning porch of me,
one final, ridiculous, holy shout
from the exit wound of my life,

it is this:

Do not betray
the moreness in you.

Do not kneel
at the altar of almost.

Do not abandon the enormity
that has survived inside you
like a cathedral
built entirely
from lightning.

Do not take lightly
your wideness,
the impossible orchard,
the stubborn green thing
that kept growing
even when no one clapped for the bloom.

Do not call it all too much because the world
has a talent for being too little.

Do not fold your thunder into a napkin.
Do not make your soul use its indoor voice.
Do not dim for applause.
Do not trade your wildness
for the counterfeit peace
of being easier
to explain.

With only a few moments left, please listen:

There is a lion
behind your ribs
that has spent years
answering to kitty.

Enough.
Let the whole room remember the jungle.

Let it mispronounce the furniture.
Let it ruin the carpet.
Let it knock over the lamp that taught you
light should stay in one corner.

Let it drag its golden, terrible body
through every careful room
of every life
where you were loved most
when you were least alive.

You were not born
with thunder in your chest
so you could spend years
whispering thank you
to the cage
because it remembered to leave you water.

You were born
to make the glass
remember sand.

Open the door.

And when you do,
when the thing you kept hidden
finally comes out wearing its own name,
when your inner life
becomes muscle,
becomes weather,
becomes a blur of mane and want
and finally,

do not stand there
crying at the threshold
with a leash in your hand
like love means calling it back.

Let it go.

Let it be terrible.
Let it be holy.
Let it be the truest thing
you ever stopped apologizing for.

Let it run
until your ancestors
mistake your body
for sunrise.

Let it run
until the grave itself
has to admit
you were difficult
to keep.

That’s it.

That’s all I got.

That is the map
I’m leaving in the drawer
beneath the grief.

Oh—

and if someone at my funeral says,
“He wouldn’t want us to cry,”
please correct them.

I absolutely would.
Tastefully.
But still.

- Matt Moberg