Awe Studies: Sound, Grief, and Imagination
This piece is part of a series that responds to the theme of the 2024 Cleveland Humanities Festival: “Awe.”
Awe: the sound of the word. I invite you to speak it aloud, with your very good mouth: Awe. Open jaw of pronunciation: Awe. Gaping maw, guttural slow punch out from the throat. No teeth to tongue, no tongue to lip, tongue in fact arched up and back, pressing into uvula. Awe.
Almost a sound of unintelligence: uhh. Sound of indecision: uhh. Slack jaw, gawk at barista who asks if I want dirt in my chai. Awe. Careful consideration of each candy in the aisle—how will the M&M’s crunch against my teeth? What consistency the Dove versus Caramello caramel? Which smoother, which sticky? Perhaps throw it all away for a Reese’s. Uhh. Nice enough straight boy, tall and awkward artist, buys me a beer then calls me “she.” Neither my friend nor I correct him, though we pass each other a look. Awe.
When my mother died, I spoke to trees. Kent State has been recognized by the Arbor Day Foundation’s Tree Campus Program for nine years running. This to say, they have a lot of really nice trees. In the eternal summer of 2020, I acquainted myself with nearly all of them. Secret forest with a witch’s pond and abandoned Gatorade bongs. Parking lot border woods, enough room to house deer and displaced humans. Blue tarp tent. Frozen doe eyes. Places average folks never think of stepping.
You may not be aware that trees speak for real, outside of poems and lyric essays. Science proves that each forest is a single organism, connected at the roots. Cortisol zips through the mycelial connections when one trunk is damaged—imagine screaming, run! Imagine crying silently into a peanut butter sandwich on the loading dock of the university’s bookstore. Imagine a breeze you can’t feel stirring the leaves, the sound almost a mother’s hush, a cradle tone impossible to hear unless absolutely still and silent. Three years and seven months later, I don’t even kick dead foliage on my way in and out of the apartment. I don’t even cry when I want to—and I never want to.
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I’m not saying I felt better when I was closer to my grief, but my awe, my heart, was more open. The detriment of healing—that the wound closes.
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Second sound, or third: Ahh. Sound of Epsom salt soak: Ahh. Sound of sudden realization: Ahh. Tongue flat against back teeth, uvula dangling free. Not a sound of grief.
Grief requires clogging. Scrape the tub drain with a pair of plastic scissors, let the wet glob drip on its trip to the trash. More plastic. More paper for the dog to chew to shreds.
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Maybe I’m broken, I think as I yank the dog’s leash to entice him down the stairs. Too hard, he’s small. Fluffy body tumbles down. At least he keeps his feet beneath him.
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My body is small. I’m not reminded of this when I stand on a rolling chair to write at the top of the white board, that’s a given to me. I’m reminded when my partner lays on top me, no exertion against gravity, fully boneless, sack of taters, and I can’t move. Squished.
The easy metaphor for depression—body pressed down. Not my experience. Depression means the greatest pleasure of my day is entering bed, swaddled navy duvet, month-old sheets, or longer. Depression means the correct way of being is horizontal. Any moment of verticality, a strain, a pain, a necessary drain. Weigh the consequences of not chasing down the sound of chewing plastic–surely the dog will tire himself out. He never does. Romp and rampage, snatch the wallet from his teeth, smack his bottom. I’m not yelling at him; I’m yelling at myself.
A lie, of course. One that doesn’t matter to the puppy hiding under the couch.
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When my mother died, I wrote poems about trees. Japanese cherry blossom twenty feet from her grave. Maybe fifty. I’m not good at estimating distance.
Enormous white cross towering across the street—one foot shorter than the height which requires a red blinking light on top. Maybe nine-hundred ninety-nine, maybe twelve-hundred forty-nine, who knows? Who cares enough to remember?
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When I laugh, it’s idiotic. Guffaw hustled up from deep in the gut. Same gut that bleeds every time I—never mind. You don’t deserve every detail of my nitty grit.
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In this story, my mom and I go to the Grand Canyon. We don’t stop every hour for the bathroom. We drive across Texas straight through the night. We scrunch our noses as the highway cuts through cattle ranches. She says, It smells like shit. We laugh, unafraid to curse. For breakfast we both get huevos rancheros from a diner in New Mexico. We drink our coffee with too much sugar and cream.
In this story, we make it to the Grand Canyon two hours after the park opens. We have all day to explore. I don’t cry till sunset, but my mom cries every time we pause for pictures. Happy tears, profound tears, heavenly. Awe.
I cry at sunset because I’m a poet and my mother’s standing ahead of me near the edge of a cliff. Not enough to be dangerous, but enough to see her placement as a metaphor for mortality. And, of course, the setting sun. I cry a little, too, because it all feels so cliché. That I should look at my mother and realize she’ll die one day. That she should notice my tears becoming heavenly—sorry, heavy—and approach me, open-armed. That we should hold each other and cry because we love each other, and happen to be together in body, space, and time. And isn’t that a miracle, or very rare occurrence? And doesn’t that deserve our weeping?
We stay the night in a tourist trap hotel and order tourist trap pizza. We watch Crazy Rich Asians and Say Yes to the Dress and eat hot fudge sundaes and take Pepto and stay up way past our bedtime. We got a room with double queens, but we sit together on one, our backs against a stack of pillows. I fall asleep with my head on her shoulder. She kisses my temple and never–never leaves.