After coming to Providence, my cosmic "I" turned atomic. It happened when I started to say goodbye to my grandmother and when my younger brother went on his first date. My life started to look like a page of words I couldn't read.

My grandmother got sick the summer before I came to college. Her illness isolates her; her thoughts are shared by no one. She used to be a person who always knew what to say, but since I've had to begin my goodbye to her, she has not known how to respond. She has forgotten her words. So I have kept my mouth open to hold these two parting syllables indefinitely. I breathe them out beside her, shaking the flame above her melting head. It is a long, searing goodbye—I sustain it loudly and close my eyes, and I wish for her to hear me. 

Yet that sound, which has turned from a swallow to a moan to a but—it protests for her life, and I hold onto it. Though I manage to communicate with her, I am hollowed out in translation. I am losing parts of my grammar and have to speak for far longer than ever before to convey my smallest thoughts.

While I'm away from her, I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking—but only several pages per sitting. Didion is a grief-stricken woman, misty-eyed, head in the clouds. The cold, quiet delirium of mourning drowns her every word. It is the book you must read to know what you'll leave behind, everyone says. But I think it is the opposite. I read it to preview the feverish solitude felt by the one left to live. 

Then there is my brother. He says so little to me. I used to know him best this way, but something has changed. What was once our unspoken understanding has become a silent disavowal. It’s funny, really. He has gone out to a restaurant I haven't heard of with a girl I haven't met, and I am in Providence. He said things on that date that I would not have been able to understand coming from him. He is growing. I rack my brain for a memory of him saying this would happen, but it seems I have missed it. He has forgotten to speak slow in translation for me. So it seems I am just as far from him as I am from our grandmother.

But my mouth still hangs open like a ripped rag left out to dry. I am folded and creased by my brother's shadow. What had tied me to the world before is now what unravels it all.

I no longer understand everything. My "I" has shrunk to a shallow signifier of a person that does not know grammar but only words, and who cannot say any of them but one. This person talks to himself, walks by himself, but never understands himself because the "I" is not him but a person he has turned into.

***

The last time I saw my grandmother, I found her in bed, awake with her eyes closed. My brother had already arrived. I smiled at him, but I don't think he saw. I watched him watch her. He seemed hot, like he was watching the sun set from where it drops off the earth and the beaming rays had undone him. But he stayed afloat in the hazy mess of our grandmother's bedroom. 

Her hand, the flame of a burning candle, she held it to her cheek, so we could see her rippling, waxy face that melted for us, then hardened into an apology that we should come so far to see the sun set on a life and a language we had barely shared. I feel these words are all I can say to hold my ties fast to the earth. Even if they do not describe what really happens, they are true.

Witnessing the burning out of our grandmother sent my brother and me to the next phases of our lives, in which real loss was as common as forgetting little things. In a way, this passage made us both closer to her. We saw this in our silence. And in our silence, we grew closer too. My brother joined me as I slipped further into a crumbling vocabulary that took more space the further it fell. 

My mouth has closed; I have said the last of my goodbye. For so long, my one hope has been that she would hear it, so now that I believe she has, I can hardly remember how not to make a sound. I focus on what is left, not a feeling but a face—my brother’s. For a while, he and our grandmother had been standing on either side of me, facing me from opposite directions. But now all I see is him, and only he faces me. The goodbye has become a hum in her absence, and my brother hears it.

How his date went, I do not know. What he is doing today, how old he is, how he liked that restaurant—I'm not sure if I care anymore. Since our grandmother's been gone, I've only hoped that we could sit in silence together again. And we do. That silence in the wake of a loss is the best thing for one who cannot understand the whirl of the world around them. Even when the hum sings on.

***

The river through Providence never has boats, but the geese and ducks swim together like they’re one and the same. The other day, once the sun went down, I swam with them and several friends. In the dark, I could not see my reflection. I came out with my jaw wide open, spitting river water and shivering. 

I woke two days later with a cold—the next day, with body aches and chills—I was back in the dark and boatless river. I had not stopped humming, but in my fever-induced delirium, I began to hear it inside my head. 

I returned to Didion. I had never finished it. Now I read through glassy eyes. The few words I could see reminded me how I had been left. I knew these words. I lived these words. But I was not alone.

I answered my brother's call from bed. I could hardly hear his voice over the hum, but there was something distinct about the way he sounded—a feeling of figuring it all out that I have grown past. He is who I was before. But I've jumped in the river and gotten sick, so I now learn the rules of this new way of living that my grandmother knew so well, trying for the life of me to figure myself out. I hear my brother blowing through the phone, making a wish, hoping to put out my flame. He will call again.

My cold stays with me a few days more. It passes. Yet the hum I will hear forever. It is the boats in the river, the geese and ducks; it is the hot, cosmic glow at the end of life we all have seen. It is what comes after. It is my grandmother's, my brother's, and mine.