Illogical
By Day
Last year in December you died.
Underground train stations filled with crowds of people passing by like schools of fish. Smells of spiced tea and sticky apple turnovers permeate your memories but remain always out of reach.
You walked side-by-side with her. Arms behind your back, clasping your hands together tightly, maintaining a berth of several feet with every step and change in direction. A well-placed joke here. A thoughtful observation there. Her mind spoke to you while her words did nothing but twist. You thought you understood what a fulfilled heart was. You only became confused once she opened her mouth.
You exited the station with leaping steps and a chest-glow determination to prove your worth. She walked with smaller steps and a rose nose from winter’s touch. You led the way, eager to reach the cafe, and nervously listened to what she said. What if you misheard something important?
You fell into her like she was a pool and you were the lucky coin flung by fate. Tossed into the air and weighing a thousand pounds, you hit the surface, fearing impact, and instead sunk safe and warm into her.
You were a scientist. Everything fascinated you, and you’d wanted to poke, test, question, understand, realize. It was foolish to think you could discover her. She’d been the one to find your heart, hidden in the most secret place.
You died when she left you. She forced you into a stranger on a land that wasn’t your own, in a language you didn’t understand. You were confused. Surely you hadn’t heard right.
Days went by, then weeks. The kettle with your morning coffee whistled and called you aboard a train that you could never get off of.
Your eyes were swollen with tears. You got up and threw open the door to feel the freeze on your skin. You sputtered into coughs from the icy air in your lungs. Your muscles stiffened from the wind that rushed upon you. Your eyes slid down from the sky. Your gaze was on a journey to your aching feet, to watch you make a death march to your great unknown destination.
Instead, your gaze caught on the flowerbed.
The flowers were dead. Hadn’t she taken such great care, gone through such labors to tend to them? Hadn’t she suffered and waited to see the bloom?
Yet they could snap between your fingers.
You swam in her existence. She’d played piano with you on Saturday mornings, taught you the differences between types of shellfish, and called you from across the world to drink cups of coffee while you fell asleep.
You didn’t even get to talk to her before she died.
They said men of science looked for logical explanations to everything. They said you, most of all, were like this. Though you couldn’t see how this was possible. You were a disaster. A scientist published in journals and cited by hundreds, but you were impractical to a fault. You felt things at a degree that seemed unfair, because no one else was sad that the lab tested on rat noses. You were sad over the nose of a rat.
This was how you couldn’t ignore it. Drifting with the winter wind was a fragrance so faint it might have been a memory. You remembered rushing through underground stations. She had liked buying the spiced tea. You liked getting the pastries with decadent melted sugar.
You smell this now.
You’ve died in every sense except the physical. It’s the look of flowers, withering, and the smell of spring in winter air, that you truly feel the thudding blood under your skin. Your heart is rampant, speeding up and telling you to once again begin.
This is not death. What is being alive more than feeling this? A horrible joy that you knew her. A spectacular grief she is gone. You’ve been driven to an edge with the aftermath, and now you are greeted by a view. You smell a sweet fragrance in the air. You are illogical. The spicy sweetness is real. She is telling you goodbye. You cry, sink to the ground, argue with the sky. But after all of that, hours, days, weeks later– you begin to wonder what will bloom in her garden in the spring, and you are already making guesses.
Bio: My name is Day and I’m deeply passionate about education, literature, and Indigenous revitalization. My hobbies include reading-marathons, making iced lattes, and trying new things.
Author’s Notes: “Illogical” is a piece written in the second person point-of-view, about a man who longs for his first love after she has died. The atmosphere of the piece is inspired by the song “Cosmic Railway” by EXO, while the story itself is inspired by Wintersweet magazine’s commitment to celebrating “the resilience of the human spirit.”
