After the Break

After we break-up, I start calling her mother every Tuesday. Her mother and I hadn’t been close during the relationship, but I miss the sound of her voice, and her mother’s voice, which sounds nothing like it, reminds me of hers because it is her mother. In the background, I can hear Yo-Yo Ma playing the violin. He’s having a good day like I am, light bleeding through the window to rest in variegated colors on the floor.
 
Often, her mother seems uncomfortable when I call. I can tell she doesn’t want to talk. She sets time limits, makes excuses, says she has to get oranges or deposit a check at the bank like it’s 2006. But you know, time is like an evening cloud passing  in the sky, like a kingfisher resting in the top of an alder while the light jigsaws its way through the river. Months pass and we start talking. She tells me of her daughter’s childhood, and I listen to her as attentively as I’ve ever listened to anyone in my life. From the rafters, I can hear a pair of squirrels breaking acorns or having a wild fuck. Everyone is having a wonderful spring.
 
She says I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I know she wants to like the moon, wants to stay in the gravitational pull of the earth even though it’s gradually slipping away. That’s a paradox, but it comforts me. She says something intimate about her daughter, the woman I no longer know, and I put down the phone and start crying. I cry and cry until the cat makes its way across the floor and gently rubs its leathery tongue across my cheek. I cry so much that the living room fills with tears, and later, after she and I have hung up the phone, I swim around the living room in my dark river. The moon, still in orbit, casts the palest of glows.
 
I swim all night as a long shelf of pink corral appears in the hallway and schools of fish dart through the silvery light. I swim past an octopus, eight armed and lonely, two hundred thousand brothers and sisters lost in the vast stretch of sea. In the bedroom swims the great Leviathan, singing in a language I can’t quite understand, but which sounds like the saddest thing on earth. All night, I listen at the door, waiting for the language to make sense.