Anagapesis

Anagapesis—the feeling when one no longer loves someone they once did.

On the first day, you lose your halo somewhere between Ashland and Halstead on the orange line. The conductor lays on the breaks too suddenly and it slides off, rolls like a dinner plate down the aisle and disappears in the crush of standing passengers. A couple of them will complain later of burns on their ankles, strange marks that set skin to humming when pressed too hard.

Your head feels suddenly lighter.

You meet a woman at the shelter that night who teaches you to say “I” and asks about your family. When you say you lost them, she pats your shoulder. It’s okay, she tells you gently, they’ll be in the last place you look. Always are.

.

On the second day, you sit in the park and watch grass grow. You find yourself forgetting what photosynthesis felt like, what it was to be engulfed in green, a network of rhizomes in the rich soil below you. You can’t hear the trees whispering to one another anymore, just wind.

You are bored. You don’t think that’s a fair trade, but you’re not sure who to take it up with.

.

On the third day, you start shedding feathers. They come away from your wings first one by one, then in handfuls—secondaries, primaries, coverts. When your pinions come away, last and bleeding, you hunch down in the doorway of a boarded-up store. Your arms are full of limp, cooling feathers, and you learn what it is to cry.

Your tears turn to steam at first. Then the glory of your wings is just an armful of burnt-out coal, and you have ash on your only good pair of pants.

.

On the fourth day, you meet a man in a bar who kisses you and says you remind him of an old girlfriend. She had eyes too old for her face too, he says, and smiles like it’s a sin. You let him kiss you again, because it might be.

You live with him for two and a half weeks before he starts asking inconvenient questions. what’s your name? where are you from? what happened to your family? why do you go to church if you always come back in such a bad mood? holy fuck what the fuck are those things on your back?

You might have been happy with him, you think, as he shouts. (It’s not your fault that what remains of your wings has shriveled to nightmarish limbs, like coat hangars growing from your scapulae.) You’re forgetting what Heaven was like more every day, you could have been happy with just this, just him.

You’ll fit better in the world, you think, once the memory of more is burned out of your skull. Once you understand love by some other measure than divine.

(You leave that next morning, slipping away with nothing but the clothes on your back, the knowledge of good and evil between your teeth.)

.

On the twenty-fifth day, you go down to the river and beg your brothers to let you back through the gates. When they ask you the Question, you lie.

they laugh, their mouths twisting and gnashing, until you turn and go.

.

On the thirty-sixth day, the day dawns clear and cold and beautiful. This is not particularly relevant, but the minutiae of the world consumes you now. Hunger and weariness, affection and distraction; the white noise of physicality that drowns you. You learn how to say “fuck” and tear out the pages from hymnals in the churches you visit. People still smile at you in the street.

You hate Him for making your shackles the color of an October sky.

.

On the forty-seventh day, you go down to the river. You can’t find your brothers. You forget what the Question was. You stay there, sitting on the concrete quay and shaking, until a woman with a dog stops by, asks if you’re okay.

That is not the Question, so you go home.

.

On the forty-eighth day, there’s rain. It’ll be good for the garden, you say absently, referring to the window box where you buried the ashes of your wings, and the strange luminous flowers that grow there. When the wind blows from the east, they make low chiming noises, like far-off bells.

You rest.