on loss and the ache for reunion
It is the time of year for going through piles of papers, old things, deciding what to keep. A form of god-play, one might say, over the kingdom of objects. A way to regain some control. They say you have to let the clutter go to welcome new life in.
My kind does a lot of staring at the moon this time of year. At small fires. The small fires on screens, too—photos and other things. Some called news.
I don’t remember you being a headline during my childhood. But your species had been collapsing my entire life, and by the time I reached adulthood, the last of you—named Cheech, by his keepers—died after twenty-two years in captivity. There were assorted, unverified sightings after that. Then not. Then your kind was declared functionally extinct.
Yours was the last of your line to survive from ancient times. The first dolphin species erased by human activity.
The loss was met with inaudible sighs and a quiet dread. Mostly unsaid: there was so much more to lose, at this rate. The heart began to encase itself in concrete, give itself over to gravity. Many sank. Others practiced a form of magical thinking in desperate resistance. It was, of course, a magical thinking that had brought us here—without you.
A magical thinking, too, that invokes this us as a known entity: small, penitent, childlike. When it feels more ambient than that. More like sewer steam.
Anyway, I am watching it now, noticing with some embarrassment how it persists. How I haven’t quite abandoned the stubborn hope that you are flipping around elsewhere, in safer waters.
How loud the river traffic must have been to your sensitive ears. You could hardly see; your ears did almost everything. Too much sound, and not enough of what you knew. The waters receded, sullied by runoff and waste. You couldn’t hear anyone you knew anymore.
I like to think that you felt some surprise—after retreating to colder, clearer waters to die—when you found another like you, doing the same. That you found a way, in spite of it all.
I suppose I got this idea from the whales. The way whole pods went missing awhile back, only to be discovered later to have moved. It’s still not clear where—only that they found a way to protect their most vulnerable, away.
My kind is known to anthropomorphize. To look to you and other creatures, seen and unseen, for clues. Some of us are always looking for clues. How to live here. How to stay. How to leave and yet remain. What to do when the senses are flooded with noise; when the others go; when new noise replaces them; when the waste of this other us comes rushing in and the living your kind was meant for is sullied, receding.
It’s nearing the winter solstice as I write this. Near the time for calling back the sun. It’s an expression now. I can think of no ceremonies I’ve witnessed where this was done in earnest. I can only imagine—summoning what magical thinking I have left—what it would mean to do this well.
How the faithful practitioner—an elder, likely, with all assembled—would have to believe. In the desperation of the dark, how bereft they would be if it were final.
No one seems to know what to do about our moon, which they say is leaving, too.
You would have to call with something larger. Another, vaster us. And mean it—from crown to toes. You would have to empty yourself first, to feel it pouring in: the rushing out from sky to earth, and then some other, unnamed rushing in.
You would have to hold the space between the emptying and whatever comes next. To feel the full ache of the loss. To sing in earnest, with all assembled, to summon the best of your life back into being.
You would have to believe in return. Not as abstraction, but as heat. As light. As the sun itself.
And you would have to call for it the way you call for a love that is leaving.
To kneel, the absurd husk of you. To be astonished by what it might still contain. To cry a deep, guttural note into the cold air—a sustained sound, calling:
come back.
