Grief Clause

while i work in my studio, my landlord performs her annual walk-through of my apartment and texts her concern: it’s pretty griefy in there. She has found grief the color and consistency of chewed Bubble Yum all over the single-family unit but especially in the following areas: in the living room where we used to get high and watch Sixty-three Scariest Sea Monsters, on the floor around the bed we bought together in a different city, and in the shower, which she specifically instructed us upon moving in two years ago to keep clean due to the potential for both grief and water damage.

“I’m so sorry. I’ll clean it immediately. I’ve been so busy with the semester,” I write back to her. The grief makes it hard to type, my fingers sticking to the phone screen and my hands coated with a pink that feels like ceramics slip.

“I’ll come back in three months to check. You know the lease.”

When we signed, I skimmed the lengthy grief clause, the instructions for prevention and maintenance, the consequences should tenants leave their grief unchecked. None of this, I figured, would apply to us. We would fall more in love in these sunny rooms.

“She’s being really judgmental,” my best friend says over the phone. I am walking from the studio to the bar you thought was tacky, the one with a hundred old clocks on the wall. It is only three but it is five where my friend lives.

“It has gotten kind of bad, though. She has a point,” I say. My body is hot with shame, the neighborhood a blur of red brick and gold leaves around me.

“Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. She doesn’t get to control how you grieve.”

I order a beer and drink it fast, open a book full of poems I won’t talk to you about and stare at it. The clocks, shaped like owls and cats and tiny wooden houses, are stuck on a hundred different times.

________

four months ago, back in spring, you decided you wanted a baby after all. We’d been together six years, which is to say five visits to my best friend, or two art degrees, or four Chanukahs in my parents’ too-clean, “post-grief” living room—“We don’t dwell, we keep busy,” my mother said brightly—or innumerable concerts in abandoned warehouses on the edges of cities, or one heirloom ring.

You hadn’t thought it through, you said. You were caught up in how much you liked, then loved me, then the pressure of school, then the move to this city, then finding freelance illustration work, then the new band, then the tour.

Now you’d had time to think. You wanted to be a father like your own father, to teach your child how to play bass, how to thread a bike through the city’s rambling park, how to draw comics. You were ready to move your life forward. You’d already quit drinking.

I remember digging my nails into my arms while you spoke, as if I was made of wet clay. As if I could sculpt myself into the kind of woman who wanted these things too.

“Are you sure?” you asked, looking down at your new boots. “You’d be really good at it.”

“You sound like my mother.”

We were on our back porch eating almost-moldy raspberries. The day was sunny but cool for early June. I wore a fuchsia dress I haven’t worn since, the one you said looked prettier than my usual denim.

“I’m sorry—I don’t want to hurt you,” you said. You pulled the zipper of your Dickies jacket up and down, as if coaxing your heart to jump out.

“Hey, look, you should have what you want. We all should. Thank you for being honest with me.” As I said these words, they floated above me, thin and grey and empty. I shoved the raspberries into my mouth, imagined dissolving into that...