At three in the morning, Oya rouses me from sleep. The dog stands on the bed and stretches, then steps onto the floor with her front paws and walks forward, dragging her body behind her across the sheets until one back paw, then the other, hit the floor. With a full body shake, she jingles the tags on her collar, before she rounds the bed to my side. She paces along the sides of my bed, beating her tail against the box spring. I open my eyes halfway, which only makes her tail wag faster. Groaning, I turn away from her and hide under the covers. Oya gives an impatient bark, a soft bark, just loud enough to send a clear message. Time to go outside.
I slide out from under the covers. Outside, a heavy snow falls past my window. The ledge that was bare when I went to sleep now has inches of snow. The falling snow is so thick that it obscures the next building, hardly twenty feet away. I stumble over to my dresser and pull on sweatpants and a hoodie. My alarm clock announces that it is 3:14am in its bright red, digital numbers.
Once, Rose and I woke at a similar hour and snuck into the dark sky reserve far outside of Cleveland, where I’d proposed to her a month earlier, to watch the peak of the Perseids. The meteors hid behind the clouds, and we hid in our sleeping bag.
And then I remember that Rose is dead.
The memory of her death, her suicide, almost always hits like this, a sudden pain like losing my footing on a patch of ice and landing tailbone, palms, and skull on the concrete before I can even register that I’ve slipped. It would be easy to say it’s like learning she’s dead all over again, but that doesn’t encompass the feeling. It’s more like reexperiencing it with a different arrangement of emotions each time. It’s always a new combination. I can’t get used to it, protect against it. I only know that it will happen, that the steady oscillations between remembering and forgetting will continue.
Oya hasn’t stopped her excited wagging and pacing. Her tail swings back and forth so fast that my eyes can only process the fan of black fur, the little tuft of white at the end of her tail making a border along the edge.
I slide my feet into my snow boots and shrug on my coat, shoving my gloves in a pocket. Oya keeps her eyes on me throughout this slow process, impatient. I walk to the door where Oya’s leash hangs next to my keys. Grabbing both, I hook the keys onto the leash and open the door onto the stairway leading outside. Oya sprints down the stairs while I descend with sluggish movements. My mind is still crossing back over from dreaming, my muscles still breaking loose from the stiffness of sleep.
When I would leave for work at four thirty every morning, I would always kiss Rose goodbye. She enjoyed being woken up then falling back to sleep for a few more hours in our bed. When she would leave for work later that morning, she would hide a sticky note with a short message somewhere for me to find after my shift.
Oya and I step outside into the wind blowing off of Lake Erie and I pull the door closed behind us. The snow is at least half a foot high, probably more. The snowplows haven’t begun their routes, leaving the snow untouched, completely covering the street. The landscape – street, sidewalks, parking lots – is unmarred, free from any human traffic. In the thick of the city, it seems we are the only living souls for miles, like we’ve accessed an empty mirror world.
We turn east to do a circle of the block, marking the snowfall with the prints of Oya’s paws and my bulky boots. The snowflakes are overlarge and downy, like feathers falling. It’s the snow that’s perfect for snowmen and snowball fights, that snow that’s so insulating it almost feels warm, that snow that silences the constant sonar of the city, that snow that makes even the most run-down street in Cleveland look like a scene in a snow globe.
After we pass the next storefront, there is a large empty lot where a school stood when Rose and I first moved here. With no windbreaks, the breath of the snowstorm has the freedom to whip and spin around this field, blowing fallen snow into miniature crags and mountains and frozen twisters. Oya pulls against her leash, eager to chase the gusts. Part of me wants to let her loose to bound through the lot, but I can’t, I couldn’t handle another loss, even though there’s neither car nor person anywhere in sight. We could be on the moon for the comfortable emptiness and isolation of the street in this early morning storm.
As a compromise, I run with her cattycorner across the lot. She is grace embodied, while I wobble in my slightly-too-big boots and falter over the uneven earth; holes and mounds left when the bulldozers hastily leveled the abandoned school. The snow hides all these scars left in the earth, leaving only a clean, unadulterated landscape. Oya bites at snowflakes and I feel a real smile on my face, so rare now. A laugh or two even breaks free from my chest.
Driving home from my parents’ house one night, Rose and I passed a deer crouching in a field and I exclaimed, Is that how deer shit?! Rose laughed until tears filled her eyes and her breath grew ragged, her city boy who knew so little about the world where she grew up. Her joy engulfed us both.
Oya and I reach the sidewalk again and slow back to a walk, heading south now. We pass the remaining wing of the school. These halls still host elementary students but in two years, contractors will arrive to demolish these rooms and begin a new construction, a school with smart boards and many electrical outlets and tablets for every student. I always leave for work before the kids show up and don’t get back from work until they’re gone–I never see them filing in with their cartoon-character backpacks or hear them shrieking on the playground. It feels like the school is already abandoned. The only sign I ever see of the students are snack wrappers blown under bushes and the occasional lost notebook on the sidewalk.
Normally, we would keep walking south until the next street, but I’m wide awake now, so I make an early turn toward the school’s fenced playground. I want to spend a little more time in this parallel world, this place that feels so much more tolerable than the one where the woman I thought I would marry would instead take her own life.
Oya realizes where we’re heading and starts pulling harder. She always races to get to the next street, the next tree, the next smell. And once we get to the next scent, she switches from unstoppable force to immovable object, thoroughly inspecting the site of interest. She will not walk again until she decides she’s ready. I admire her zeal, but I wish I could explain patience to her, to explain that the scent will still be there to sniff if we walk at a slower, more regular pace. In a moment like this, I wish I could explain to her the exquisite peace of this quiet calm, slow her down to drink it in.
I knew I wanted to marry Rose the first time we went for a walk in the woods. She found a creek and quickly pulled off her shoes, tossing them aside and stepping into the current. The water parted around her ankles as she stood transfixed, the biologist still in awe, after years of study, of the tiny lives inhabiting the creek, under rocks and in small eddies.
After Oya and I cross the parking lot, I pull the playground gate open, moving with it the snow that’s already several inches above the bottom bar. The path of the gate and the chain-link makes an arc, a colorless rainbow pivoting around the fence post, leaving a small berm at the end of its path. I remember the Foucault pendulum at my college. On the cold rainy days of February in South Carolina, I would take my smoke breaks next to it; it was outdoors but in an alcove protecting it from the elements. I watched the oscillations back and forth like a hypnotist’s pocket watch. Each swing ticking off the seconds while the point at the end of the weighted bob etched a path through the sand and the earth turned beneath it.
I had quit smoking by the time Rose and I got together. But I quietly coveted her cigarettes until one day I asked for one, trying to infuse a casual tone into my voice. I haven’t been able to quit since. Smoke breaks marking time, carving away at my time.
I don’t use the Gregorian calendar anymore. My starting point is no longer the birth of Christ, but the death of Rose. It’s been 71 days since she died, assuming she died on December 8th. Her death certificate says the 9th because they didn’t find her body until the next day, but I know that it was just after 7pm on the 8th. But saying it’s been 71 days assumes that time makes any sense or progresses at any sort of uniform rate, which I no longer believe, despite the hours I used to pass watching that pendulum, despite the even squares on my calendar, the uneven hands sweeping around the face of my wristwatch.
When I look at the actual timeline of events, I find the purported reality utterly baffling. My call history tells me that she called me at 7:02pm on December 8th to say goodbye, that I learned she was officially missing at 11:37pm, and of her death on the 9th at 3:09pm. The measurable facts indicate that less than a day passed between those phone calls and yet surely several years elapsed in that time. The two hours between hearing the news at my desk and getting home after work lasted several days at least. December 7th had surely been sometime in the previous decade. Meanwhile, my brain keeps performing acrobatics to maintain that she is not actually dead, that it’s been some sort of practical joke or gross error, and I’m marking time by something that never happened. It’s been 71 days since Rose did not die. Nothing makes any sense. The pendulum swings.
Oya tugs even harder on her leash so I let go while I pull the gate closed behind us. She sprints around the perimeter at an impossible velocity before coming back to me, tail whipping through the air, jowls pulled back in her smile. I take off her leash, already matted in snowpack, hang it on the fence, and pick up some snow to make a snowball. She sits expectantly, and her tail keeps wagging, tracing that same arc through the snow, keeping time with her bliss. I throw the snowball and, when she can’t find it, she digs and bites at the snow where it landed. I make another snowball and call her back. We keep doing this until the smells on a fence post distract her and she loses interest.
I keep running the night that Rose died over in my mind. The weeks before, the months, the years before; trying to figure out where it went wrong, where I went wrong. I spend hours trying to identify the point of no return, to determine at what point her immovable resolve to stay alive was overcome by the unstoppable force of suicide.
Maybe if I had answered her call? Or called her back immediately? Maybe if I had pushed her harder to get help? Maybe if I had broken up with her? Maybe if I hadn’t proposed? Maybe if I had kept walking when she saw me, years after we had first dated? Maybe if I had taken a different route to class that day we met? Could I have stopped this? I could have stopped this. I should have stopped this.
But maybe it wasn’t my fault at all. Maybe none of these moments were the tipping point. Maybe life is not so orderly and episodic, maybe the point of no return was the moment she pulled the trigger, and the only unstoppable force was the bullet that erased her life. Maybe everything could have been completely different if she had chosen instead to spend her evening standing in a creek, in awe of life. Maybe there is no one to blame but Rose herself. Or maybe there is no one to blame at all. Maybe the pendulum just keeps swinging.
Our last Christmas together, we drove to her parents’ house in Appalachia. On the drive south, we talked about our suicidal thoughts, how they had vanished for us both since we’d been together, how, after decades of uncertain, empty futures, we were both dreaming of growing old together, of living.
Snow has collected so heavily on the slide in the playground that it’s begun slipping off the bottom in a sheet. As the snowy strip lands on the ground below, it’s folded back and forth over itself building up a cartoonish pile. It reminds me of the ribbon candy that I’ve only ever seen in the homes of grandmothers. I have an urge to touch it – to push the snow from the top and make more bends of snow ribbons or climb up and slide through the wrinkles or to jump on the perfect bends at the bottom. For a moment, the beauty of it all kindles a radiant warmth from my chest out through my fingers and toes – Oya chasing the gusts of flakes, my childlike urge to stomp through the snow, the perfect quiet of the snowstorm. Then, in a flash, the grief comes back. Rose is dead.
There is no timeline for grief, people keep saying to me, it is not linear or rational. But I don’t even want to admit to grieving because I’m so angry with Rose. We had always discussed our suicidal thoughts openly. She told me about how the thoughts of ending her life had plagued her since she was 10 years old. She told me about how, if nothing else, the previous two decades had taught her the tools to fight those intrusive ideas. She quoted the pithy aphorisms passed on by countless therapists. She told me that it simply wasn’t an option anymore. Yet here I am, crying in the playground behind what was once our home, playing with the dog that was once our dog, breathing, feeling, living. Meanwhile, Rose exists only as collections of memories, emotions, and bag of ashes sitting on a folding TV dinner table next to her mother’s recliner somewhere in Appalachian Tennessee. The pendulum swings.
My face aches with the cold and when I try to wipe the tears off of my cheeks I succeed only in transferring clumped snow from my glove to my face. The spell of the storm is broken. I call Oya back over to the gate and clip her leash back onto her collar. Her tongue is lolling happily out of the side of her mouth and her heavy breath forms thick clouds in the air. Her joy emanates so hotly, I expect to see the snow around her melt away. I wonder what it would be like to be so easily cheered, to wash away each unpleasant feeling with the bath of the next pleasurable experience.
I open the gate and she trots through in front of me, leading us around the other side of the school, stopping to sniff the corner of the old brick building as we turn right again. The pendulum swings away.
We brought Oya home on an equally snowy night. The painfully skinny dog was so nervous and excited that she would only stay still if she was sitting in Rose’s lap while I drove the three of us home from the animal shelter. The dog now breathing heavily from bounding through the snow tonight, shivered visibly when we took her outside together for her first walk, moving quickly as if to get inside again as soon as possible. The pendulum swings back.
We turn right once more and walk up to our door. I fumble with partially frozen fingers to unlock the deadbolt then the door handle. Oya walks in first. I let go of her leash and she sprints up the stairs while I lock the door behind us and try to kick the snow off of my boots. We decided, before she came home, that the dog would not be allowed on the furniture. Then Oya jumped up on the bed while we were getting ready to go to sleep that first night. She curled up right in the center of it, looking at us with her large, dark eyes, each visible rib weakening our resolve until we caved completely.
I trudge up the steps and awkwardly kick off my boots outside the door at the top. Oya sits in the doorway waiting for me to remove her leash before she dashes to her water dish. I hang the leash and keys on their hooks by the door and walk back to my bedroom, pulling off my layers clumsily as I go. I strip back down to my t-shirt and boxers, leaving the sweatpants, hoodie, gloves, hat, and coat in a crumpled mound by my dresser. I climb back under my sheets as the pendulum swings away again. Once Rose and I got in bed on the first night, Oya wiggled under the covers and planted herself between us. She loved to curl up in a tight little ball between us. At the end, before Rose ran away, I always let Oya sleep in the bed as a buffer.
Oya comes into the room, hops onto the bed, and stands by my shoulder, waiting for me to lift the covers for her. Once I do, she walks under them, sniffs, turns a few circles, then curls up next to me, in the nook made by my chest, hips, and thighs. Before things got bad, before Rose disappeared into herself, she snapped a picture of Oya and I napping together on the couch once, the engagement ring on my left hand visible in the photo. One night, as I slept on the couch after a fight, Oya got out of bed and came to sleep with me.
I roll over to turn off the lamp beside the bed. Oya stirs, but before she has time to move, I’m back in position, wrapping the tight spiral of her body with my own. We used to read before bed, Oya between us. I would pet Oya with my right hand, holding my book with the left and Rose would do the opposite, until we said goodnight and kissed each other with simple certainty.
I close my eyes and pray to forget again, to fall asleep, maybe into a world where Rose is still alive or a world where we never met at all. I place my hand on Oya’s head and fiddle with her ears until she shakes them loose. I adjust the covers.
Rose looked so lovely on that August afternoon when I proposed. The light playing in her auburn hair so much like it did on that sunny November day, when we kissed for the first time, standing in a crowd of people, when it felt like we were the only living souls for miles.
The night she died, she left a voicemail to say goodbye. I could hear a faint metallic clink in the background as she ended the call.
I thought we were invincible. I felt we were lovers carved in marble; immortal, impenetrable, inseparable. I forgot that the pendulum keeps swinging.
T.L. Pavlich is a writer, theatre artist, and storyteller whose writing has appeared in Foglifter Journal, HAD, and The Offing, among others. They received the 2018 SMC Lambda Literary Fellowship and a residency at Banff Center of Arts and Creativity. T.L. is a Features Editor at The Rumpus and at work on a memoir that explores mourning a suicide while wrestling with suicidal ideation.