Tethered

Sometimes I like to stand outside and watch the wind. I try to remember what it felt like, rustling through the tiny hairs on my arm, filtering through my thick beard. They say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. I watch the six-foot branches of the redwood in our yard shake and shimmy and regret that I ever took such a powerful and beautiful force for granted. I’m not sure I will ever grow used to this numbness. Of course, time has no sense anymore, but this existence – if that’s a fair name for it – has felt like an eternity. It makes all the times I growled at the work clock for moving so slowly feel like a high-speed roller coaster.

While my curly mane of facial hair remains still, I feel not even a breeze across my face. I watch helplessly, just as I did last November. The leaves are falling and gathering; it worries me – a fire hazard. They need to be raked and shoveled into the compost bin. Savannah knows that, but it was my job. She didn’t get to it until nearly January last time I observed them, and I can only hope she remembers to do it sooner this winter.

As if my thoughts have conjured her, I hear her car pulling up the road, the pebbles crinkling into the tires, the hum of the engine, even the soft evening jazz she has playing on low volume. Physical touch is a ghost of the past, but some senses - like hearing – they carry over into this new form. Suddenly being in one place and then another, that’s a trick humans have desired for centuries, always trying to get from Place A to Place B in the blink of an eye, but the closest they ever managed was their speed trains and airplanes. The truth is, you have to die first before you can teleport. I don’t walk out to the front driveway, I am just there now, watching my Savannah huffing and puffing and stuffing her arms with as many grocery bags and items from her car as she can manage. She curses, struggling and determined to make this unloading a single trip. In her grief, her determination has only grown stronger. I can’t help but laugh a little – she’s still in there – even though it kills me (again) to watch her doing this alone, coming home to an empty house where help isn’t even something she can decline.

Time has done its work, and we are inside now. Her post-work routine tonight is no different than it has been: first (always first), she pours herself a glass of whiskey and takes one of those pills her doctor gave her (for the depression); second, groceries away (if there are any); third, she lights a candle on a placemat she leaves out for me; fourth, she makes dinner; fifth, she smokes a joint before bed (for the insomnia). Right now, she’s at four, monotonously stirring a simmering pot of soup, starring blankly at it like her mind is trying to be in a million places but is stuck in one. I am sitting on the stove beside her, wishing the steam would grant my nose a taste. Her cooking was one of the reasons I vowed to love her for the rest of my life. I know I am not in heaven, nor in hell, but without Savannah’s food, it sure feels like the latter.

“I see you haven’t learned to cook for one yet,” I chuckle. I always did have a habit of saying a joke I knew she wouldn’t find funny. Guess I haven’t learned much either.

My routine – if an afterlife outside the realm of time can have such a thing – has only ever consisted of one thing: watching her. I reach out, knowing, painfully, that I cannot truly touch what used to be mine. What still is mine. I hear her heartbeat steadily increase as my opaque hand travels closer to her chest.

The tether. It is what keeps her coming home to whiskey and weed. It is what keeps me here, between two worlds.

The day my life ended – if what happened after is still considered a day – I learned about our tether. I was running late, so late that I didn’t even make the coffee. So late that I didn’t even kiss Savannah’s warm, rosy cheek on my way out. She’d reached out to me in her sleep, as she always did when she heard me leaving. Gotta go, love you, I rushed the words out through sleep-crusted eyes. It was a fifty-seven-mile drive to work, at least an hour, and I’d barely been awake for five minutes when I started the car. Going over the mountain that morning, there were three moons. They were white, so bright that it made everything around it feel darker, even as they lit up the nearby redwoods as they came closer and closer. Two of the moons were heading straight towards me, gaining speed. And then they were loud, like an alarm clock willing me to open my eyes. But by the time I did, I was no longer driving. I was no longer anything.

People say that when you die, there is a tunnel of white light and then you’re taken to a dreamy place made of clouds where everything is better. In my death, there was certainly bright light, but in the aftermath of my death, there was no cloudy paradise. There was only a woman named Carol and an office of cubicles, where the moons were now rectangular fluorescent lights, hanging over our heads. I was confused. I was frightened. I was irate, thinking something had happened to Savannah. Or perhaps, it was a form of earthly hell and I’d woken up in an IRS office. Discombobulation is what happens after death. At least that was the case for me.

Carol, who had died of a minor heart complication, had lived a long life as a career counselor in a small town of Iowa. But she’d really been more than that, a life-long mentor for her students in and out of her professional obligation to them. She’d influenced so many lives, even fostering students who’d lost their parents to drug addictions and prison sentences and short lives. She’d served as a mother to so many adolescents that when her heart failed her at the early age of sixty-three, she wasn’t done helping people. She never wanted to stop. And thank goodness for that, or else she never have been able to help me.

“You’re dead, dear,” she’d said to me in a way only a dead mother could say. “But you can’t go on. She won’t let you. And if she won’t let you go, you’ll never let her go.” That’s when Carol explained to me about our tether, a force between the two of us that keeps us connected to one another. It’s what keeps me here, and it’s what keeps her in a state of constant grief, a cycle Savannah cannot release without my help, and I, hers. The tether must be mutually broken.

We’re sitting on the couch now, and that candle she lit for me burns alone on the dining table she never uses anymore. She’s on her second glass of whiskey, and if I weren’t dead, I’d be impressed. She never drank anything on the rocks when I was alive, no matter how hard I tried to convince her to try it. She’s watching a reality show, something she knows I’d hate, because it helps her mind shut off. Other people’s drama means there’s no room for her own, but she’s lying to herself.

I’ve sat with her on this couch every night since Carol told me I will exist forever this way until our tether is broken. (“No part of a living person can come into the afterlife. It’s just not possible,” she’d said). Tonight is different than those other nights. I’d spent those nights contemplating: could I even let her go if I tried? Do I want her to let me go?

I could never find the strength. Neither of us wanted this. We didn’t choose this. It wasn’t like we fell out of love, suffered a horrible marriage, or resented each other. We didn’t plan to break up. Our ending didn’t seem fair. Exhaustion stole our life. It was exhaustion that made me drive onto the wrong side of the road. Exhaustion killed me, and now we are both stuck.

I cannot touch Savannah, not physically, but Carol says there are other ways. Other ways to communicate with her, if I ever did decide to break the tether. Or at least try. I reach out, this time towards her empty glass on the coffee table. I close my eyes and imagine myself pulling the glass. I hear it slide across the table, and Savannah jumps. She’s frozen, staring at the cup that just moved five inches away from her.

“What the –?” she says. She grabs the remote and mutes her show.

I wish death took my emotions – I mean, of course, I do, who wouldn’t? I feel guilty for frightening her, and I just wish there were a gentler way to do this. I move the glass back. Savannah springs to her feet, pressing a hand to her forehead, steadying herself. I can tell she’s counting the number of drinks she’s already had, questioning her sobriety. I can see she is convincing herself of this, brushing off the explanation that it could be anything else than too much to drink. I can’t let her do that.

This really pains me to do because I’ve watched horror films with her before but… I flicker the lights a little before turning them, and the TV, off entirely. When the room goes dark, she screams, blood-curdling. If I could, the sound is enough to make me cry.

“What the shit is going on?” she’s frantic now, feeling around on the couch for her phone. She must think it’s an intruder. She’s probably going to call 911.

“She must think that it’s you. That’s imperative,” Carol had explained. “This is the only way she’ll be able to see you. She has to come to this on her own.”

The room is dark, but my candle still flickers from the table. Savannah has found her phone and her fingers are quickly moving across the screen. I need her to know it’s me. I need her to see that candle. I think of our wedding photo hanging on the wall across from our table. I’d like to place it near the candle, or bring it to her, but it’s beyond my ability. I squeeze my eyes and wait for the shattering of glass. Savannah screams again, dropping her phone, but this one is worth it: she is looking at the frame, which now lies flat, face down just a few feet from my chair. She doesn’t need to pick it up to know what photograph is no longer on the wall.

Savannah’s eyes dart between the fractured frame and the glowing candle. She’s trembling when she says my name. “Silas?”

Carol had not prepared me for the sensation of unveiling. It is not like a wave, but like a sudden gust; my invisibility is like a brown leaf whisked from its branch, and I am floating, slowly, gently into the space. My whisper materializes like a breath: “Yes,” I say, and I know I am heard.

Savannah spins around, and just as quickly, she’s suppressing a gasp, and then tears. “It can’t be –! ”

“It is, my love.” I tell her.

When she runs for me, arms yearning, she passes through me, and our hearts break all over again.

Savannah curses, hysterical in her cries, “No, no, no! This isn’t real! Fuck, fuck, fuck – stop!” She squeezes her eyes, pounds at her head, my death like a plucked leaf regrowing in her body, and she’s trying to dig it out. What was once only words from Carol, I now feel in my new, visible form. The tether, pulled taut in her pain. She’s pulling me back, holding on tighter.

I am suddenly in front of her, making the gesture of holding her cheeks, willing her to look at me without the force in my hands to make it happen. “Savannah, Savannah, stop, honey, stop. You have to listen. You have to hear this…” She’s lost, frantic in her madness, refusing to hear me.

I yell the one thing I know my living self would yell in a time like this: “Coconuts!” 

At the sound of our safe word, Savannah freezes, breaking her out of her hysteria. She looks at me, mouth stuck open, skin as pale as mine. “It is you,” she breathes.

“It’s me, love.” We stare at each other in silent wonder for a moment. No amount of time, no amount of deaths, will rewire the urge I have to touch her; I’m hovering my hands over her shoulders, her arms, her face.

“How can it be?” Savannah asks, reaching out to stroke my beard, equally as unsuccessful as I.

And though my mouth has been voiceless for some time, I unleash. I tell her everything. I tell her I am sorry I didn’t make the coffee when I left in the morning. I tell her I am sorry I didn’t kiss her goodbye. I tell her she was right – I didn’t get enough sleep, and it cost me my life. I tell her how beautiful she is. And I tell her about the tether.

“I don’t know how long it’s been for you, for us, but Savannah, you have to let me go –”

She objects immediately. “No, I–”

“We vowed until death, Savannah. And mine has come and gone. Don’t let exhaustion kill you, too.” The tears on her face come faster, a waterfall that will never let the river run dry. I want to wipe them away. It’s painful, but I can see the shift in her eyes. I can see the reason the tears are thicker, running quicker.

She understands. She’s an infant fighting her nap: she’s exhausted and stubborn. But she’s almost ready. It is my window of opportunity, and I take it.

“I love you,” I tell her.

“I love you, too,” she says.

“Now, let me go.”

When Savannah nods, it is subtle, slow, miniscule, but it sends a storm through the room. There is a gust of wind sweeping around us, and then a loud snap. The candle on the table extinguishes, and the lights flicker on. I feel both a release and the pull to somewhere else. Savannah calls out, instantly regretting the small gesture that has initiated our untethering. I hear her like a faraway voice, muffled and lost in the distance: “Wait!”

But her words are nothing but a breeze. And then a familiar feeling, as if it had been there all along, the wind, brushing up against my skin. It is the feeling of time passing. It is the feeling of change. It is the feeling of breathing after holding your breath.

We are finally free.