Startles (an elegy)

1.

She told the story from beginning to end, when it was the end that mattered. Story gets in the way of death; perhaps that’s why we’re drawn to it. Not that stories explain our lives to us, but they interrupt their flow. Do not want your friend to be immortal, Weil inveighs. But mortality's the form of our beauty, and hers (and hers before) was not.

2.

She and I watched the OJ chase in my living room in Makiki, spent hours on the phone weighing the clues. Among them, the blond detective with a racist bent, and a glove that may or may not have fit. There was a wall, and an outbuilding with another blond man inside, a high pitched, thin Falstaff, good on television. She liked television dramas, the way you could piece clues together. She wasn’t persuaded OJ did it.

3.

We never solved that one, nor can I solve her death. The unopened cards, years old, the unopened bills, the unopened boxes of subscription teas, the unopened suitcases and a box containing Sina’s papers. The scatter itself was closed, too confusing to piece together. She’d laughed at my resistance to narrative; now I wish there were one. A clean one, beginning, middle, the end.

4.

A good day to sit inside the rain, a roof between, the constant percussion of high and low, fast and slow drops. Ferns reach out their tousled hands, as if to reach through the window grid. My algorithm brings me a brief video on shame, a song by Dolly Parton. Another friend prays to Dolly for her, though she’s Buddhist. Survival is a rhinestone performance in high silver boots and low cut dress.

5. I pulled her tiny red shoes out of the car after she died, carried them to the garage, wondered why I was holding them, returned them to the car. Inside were remnants of fast food, dog treats for the dogs she walked. Her slice of the gig economy. Academia was a sick jig we danced lest we get stuck, like Medea or Lot’s wife, for looking back. One student tells me she was writing a “dark memoir.”

6.

She talked in code. Or was it fiction as fact, easier to breathe through? She called them “Heathers,” devoted a square of her instagram to the name. Sometimes she laughed to think they fit a narrative they’d never recognize. “The clique,” AI tells me, “consists of three girls who are all named Heather.”

7.

Beside the door from her garage into the laundry room, I spotted a copy of Cortazar’s Hopscotch. It had just arrived, her twin tenants said. I told them they could read the novel from beginning to end, or they could use a key at the end to read it in other directions. He wrote narrative software before the fact of software. I didn’t tell them about the man in a short story who became the fish he’d been visiting at the aquarium.

8.

Looking out, he saw others looking in at him. Trans-species thought seems paranoid, but knows what the other thinks, and it’s rarely good. To be a fish is to inhabit a role you can’t understand. A diasporic person flung from China to LA to Honolulu, where she was doubly foreign.

9.

Polite, self-enclosed, distant in public. And then, over the years, in private. “She became more distant after she didn’t get promoted,” a friend told me. “I tried to call and text and write to her,” they all said. She told stories to push them away.

10.

“I’m worried about our friend,” Sina said. She wrote a long letter in her defense. Then one morning I called her to say that Sina was dead, murdered by a friend in Samoa. We’d all had lunch some months before in Chinatown, an awkward triad that failed to last the twin defeats to come. Silence became us.

11.

“We read,” Weil notes, “but we are also read by others.” “To be a slave is to be forced to read yourself as others read you.” “ A dialogue of the deaf.” “Each being cries in silence to be read otherwise.” Weil writes. “Don’t be deaf to their cries.”

im mem.

Simone Weil, Cahiers: Tome 1. Paris: Plon, 1951. Translations mine.