Safety Deposit

I placed something valuable somewhere hidden.

They didn’t know what happened to you. Everyone speculated about where you’d gone, wide-eyed and wildly wrong. As if acknowledging the most likely truth would allow something irrevocably dark into their own lives, god forbid. I was the least likely to say it, yet I did say it. You were gone. Chances are for good. You burned bright yet short, which is better than some longlived nobody never even sputtering into life at all. You were somebody. Somebody. Your dreams were also concrete—your adherence to the well-trod trails while attending countless wild auditions; your marriage of pragmatism and fancy. Possessing neither, truth be told, I envied both. Hell, probably I envied you. Publicly (and far worse, privately) I cried as much over this as over your absence.

None of which anyone knew.

Observe that bank of trees, that near-vertical forest, bearing its weight of snow with nary a complaint. It is the triumph of the mindless collective. But also, one has to admit, deeply, deeply beautiful. Heavy limbs so darkly green they may as well be black, straining and actually prevailing against the weighty onslaught of white, as if the history of the races of our world were being mockingly re-enacted with alternate outcomes through this silent, neutral Canadian landscape.

In this aquarium of traffic—blue-green bleeding to blue-violet—everyone feels the need to flick on headlights. Especially here, right here in this place, the exact location in which you stepped from your Subaru Forester, apparently for a bathroom break, beneath the gathering imposition of pine and fir and spruce and cedar as the daylight failed to the sound of a seething creek, only to disappear forever, my love, my enemy, my perplexing friend. Your ticking station wagon abandoned on the shoulder, shut down, cooling fast, the last CD in the changer an ABBA mix.

I can almost hear the shush-shush of tires as they pass, taut-faced drivers all wary of twilight ungulates, kids asleep or grumpy-sly in back, nobody paying any meaningful attention as the vengeful shadow pulls up behind, bides his quiet time until your hip-hugging pants are lowered mid-thigh…

…and you squat quickly and neatly, desiring a quick release in the cold, never even suspecting that a quick release could mean something else entirely, while the avenger falls upon you—crushing, final—and your still-warm body is dispatched (the wrench) and collected (the flinch) and deposited far, far way, somewhere, I don’t ever want to say where (the stench), and perhaps we’ll recite Donne or Auden and play “Dancing Queen” at your memorial amid a galaxy of white lilies while I alone recall those laden branches—the burden of life beneath wet relentless weather, a quick shudder while the ghost vacates—and smile a little self-mockingly at one small victory however fucking tawdry and goddamn it all to hell I so ache with missing you girl.

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A version of this post appeared on BlergPop on June 28, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.