Sharanya Manivannan
Rituals for Closure
Dragonfly
On the evening of the storm that
never came, a dragonfly dropped
onto the stone table where I sat,
waiting. I picked it up so it could
die in my palm. It had only three
wings, and something that pulsed
at the end of its long blue body,
bulbous and erratic, that would
not stop pulsing no matter how long
I pressed the tip of my finger along
its length, smoothed the delicate
unstained glass panels of its wings.
Die, my little one </i>, I told it. That’s
enough. But it would not, those tiny
gills contracting and dilating while
the body that housed them lay still
and recumbent in my hand.
“You’ve held it too long,” said my
friend. “Maybe it didn’t expect this –
something warm and soft, and safe”.
She placed her hand over mine and
we upturned our palms, so the dying
thing fell into hers. She looked at it.
She gave it back, still breathing.
I was not the death it imagined,
the death it might have prepared to
meet – in cool soil, against a leaf
slippery with raindrops, upon
collision, upon capture. I was the
wrong psychopomp, one with a
history of resuscitation, one who had
tried to keep alive dying things,
auscultating reluctant hearts with an
amplified sense of desperation. My
motives, as always, were suspect. I
needed the dragonfly to die not for
the other things that had died in me,
but for the things that hadn’t – that
fluttered their wings in shock in
certain moments, their ghosts raising
the living from their beds.
Cicada
Once, I watched a man watch a
woman sing to the dead, watched
until the spirit, sung free, emerged
from his own throat, years later, in the
form of a Shanghainese opera. He
was incandescent in his own
mortality then, his song illuminated
with every loss that had preceded or
would pursue the headiness of that
evening, his voice rising in a small
theatre in a country full of ghosts.
We walked out into a night of low
lights and cicadas singing in the
tropical heat, as though it was what
they were meant to do, as though their
years of subterranean sleep dissolved
into the air the moment they emerged,
an army with a singular collective
dream. The cicada emerges for one
thing alone. He sings her into his wings,
serenading first out to her, and then
into her, singing because it is everything –
singing because – singing life into a
body and then out from it.
Sex, death, birth – these are the cycles
of nature. But the song is the mystery.
The song is the secret, the reason for all
the rest of it. What we fuck into
existence or oblivion. What comes
over us, instinctual and predatory, that
we wrap around ourselves on nights
where the memory of what we have
done alone is enough to etherize our
bones. What we wait for.
And why. And why.
Moth
In the weeks
after my grandmother’s death, I
knew the company of moths and
butterflies that bloomed their anxious
wings on my fingers, my face,
roosting at my hips and shoulders
and not alighting until a hand other
than my own drew near. They sought
me out as though something in my
darkness was luminous, as though
I was a lantern and not, like them, a
bewildered thing, looking for one.
I know now that it is not the dead
alone who need psychopomps. I
know now that those who are left
behind are also blind to the route,
are as liable to be led astray.
I know now that there people
who will manipulate the grief
of the mourner, who will crack
her open like a locked box, just for
curiosity’s sake, look
within her, and leave.
But in the weeks that followed
that shipwrecked hour of
departure, I did not know
these things. I did not know
that there are rituals for closure,
lines that must not be crossed in the
time of mourning, that to transgress
them with or without intent would
mean months of no sleep, bereft of
the incantations that would deliver
me from such purgatory. I knew only
that when I had kissed my
grandmother’s corpse, my lips had
come away with the language of the
desert, and it was into one that I
followed her, her army of moth
messengers, laughing at something I
had dared to call love – and living
perhaps only so I could speak of it.