reading room
The Garden After
I take the high seat— not on a cloud, just above the aisle, the exact shape of my body in light.
The bell tests its throat. Someone coughs into their sleeve. My name lands like a hat on a hook. It stays.
They came: the neighbour who brought my bins in on windy nights, the friend who never let me pay, the teacher who wrote in the margin good question, a cousin who laughs half a second late and cries at adverts, someone who once sold me a perfect peach on a too-bright day, And the few who knew the soft, stubborn animal of my mornings— Three alarms, two snoozes, tea before verbs, A dull-pencil list, started in the dark, finished on the train.
An organ warms up— electrons yawn through the cables, and the hymn does that rising thing that makes even unbelievers tidy their spines.
I watch my absence sit among them like a coat left on the back of a chair— useful, warm, and not in need of anything.
Eulogies: how I argued kindly about commas, how I let the day slow to match the rain, how I kept time the way my brain does— offbeat then sudden and exact, hands tapping private rhythms, fluorescents a little too loud, the hum a little too close, whole hours vanishing into one bright task— and how I believed in small rituals: a window seat, a desk briefly cleared, friendship you could pause and resume mid-sentence.
Someone says I wasn't afraid of much. They're wrong and right. I feared the wrong things: alarms, exams, the day's thin glass; not the evening that follows all days.
The priest tries a net of text; some fish flip through and glitter on the carpet. A child drops an order of service, picks it up, looks inside as if there might be a secret map. There is, but not there.
If I could interrupt, I'd keep it short: Don't fear the gods—they are busy being sky. Don't fear my death—I don't have it; you do. What is good was easy to obtain; you watched me do it— a walk, a pond, a step, your hand. What hurts is usually endurable— and when it isn't, it ends.
At the door, lilies flank the day like white parentheses. Inside them, talk begins to loosen. Someone remembers the joke about the two philosophers in a lift. Someone checks the time, then doesn't.
We walk—yes, I say we though my walking is the quiet kind— to the hall with the silver urn and the paper cups, absolutely convinced they're china. Breath fogs the low windows; grief drums a teaspoon once.
My friends build a small republic around a plastic table. They legislate mercy: Tell the story where I tripped and bowed. Tell the one where I cried at a busker's song. Tell the one where the power went out and we kept talking, faces lit by the cold blue aquarium of our phones turned screen-down to make a little night.
A breeze makes the noticeboard creak— that small swerve—clinamen— atoms choosing new neighbours: my breath diffused in fern, in dust motes, in the warm air that softens the eyelids of a stranger.
I stand—as much as standing applies— by the neat line of cups waiting in rows. There it is again: the good that is easy— time, company, quiet. Someone said, you'd have liked this. I do, in the only way left: by not needing to be anything at all.
What will they say? They say it. What will it be like? It is this: a room where the light rearranges shadows, where sorrow loosens its tie, where laughter arrives late and is welcomed anyway.
When they go, chairs push back with small polite groans. The floor keeps the imprint of their shoes a moment, then forgets.
I watch the last light fold the afternoon between stations. No throne, no verdict—just plenty: the world continuing to be the world, and my place in it, a clean subtraction, leaving space enough for another chair.
Take it. Eat if you're hungry. Call each other later, and then actually call. Leave the lilies; keep the promise to text back. If you must keep something of me, keep the habit of pausing at ripe fruit you do love, and the way we looked at one another as if there were time.
— Lilith