Calling a Grave a Grave

Olivia Wieland 

An ex-lover visited me in my dream last night. I call him an ex-lover because that is all he was and all he could be; until fantasy became memory. 

Once, he took me on a walk beneath a highway and down past the river and into the green. A religious older man stopped us somewhere along the path, after the highway but before the river. I know he was religious because he asked us if we were. I shook my head no and my ex-lover shook his head yes. One of us was lying. He asked us our names.  

“Powerful names. There is a power between the two of you,” the man told us. I itched the back of my ankle with my opposite foot and waited for him to quit talking. That was one of our differences, that I was always wanting to move forward, while my ex-lover liked to linger in a moment. Every passing interaction a window for opportunity; a space to run uncontained. I try to enjoy stillness now, on my own. I don’t have the same knack for it. I remember wishing I had worn different socks.  

We often joked about how when we were together the world responded to our joined presence. We attracted strangeness like a light burning on two barstools. Everyone was drawn to our orbit. It was like that from the start. The day our relationship started he asked me if I wanted to go for a ride on his motorcycle, and I surprised myself by saying yes. It felt like surrender. The way he drove made my heart stop flat in my chest. Weeks later I sent him an Ada Limón poem, the one about the horses being born, how they come out fully formed, ready to run. I still think of our relationship that way; muscles burning and wind in our hair.  

He talked with the proclaimed preacher, while I stared and thumbed the hem of my dress. Eventually the preacher turned back around and bid us well, told us something along the lines of God is watching over you, and I wondered why God would give his words to a man passing his time beneath a highway bridge.  

My ex-lover, I guess I should give him a name, since this is and isn’t about him, David, kept leading me further into the woods. He could probably tell I was becoming agitated. My intrigue peaked when he pulled off the road haphazardly, struck by an idea, saying there was something he wanted to show me. So far it had seemed like every beaten trail in the state of Connecticut.  

I bit my tongue and pretended to enjoy the act of putting one foot in front of another. I was trying to be more outdoorsy, or maybe more agreeable.  

“Here,” he said. I stared. It was a tree like any other. Still, David stared at it and something I didn’t recognize washed over his face. I stared at him staring at the tree. The tree just was.  

“I buried my dog here. Charlie. When I lived above the corner shop we drove by earlier, I would walk him on this trail every morning. He died of old age.” David wandered a few feet and began looking around for stuff sprouting out of the ground.  

“What did he look like?” I asked, trailing behind to pick up the lesser sprouts he leaves behind.  

“Black and white, scruffy, terrier-like. The last few years he was so old the fur on his face turned snow white. He wouldn’t move around the house himself. I had to carry him up the stairs. But the second I said let’s go for a walk that bastard would spring right up.”  

I nodded and constructed an image of Charlie in my mind. Pictured his body sleeping beneath the great root of this tree.  

David’s face suddenly cracked open into a laugh; split open into jagged lines and teeth and his cheeks swallowed his eyes. That is one of the things I liked, or loved, about him. I hardly knew at the time. 

“What’s funny is, the day I came to bury him here, I sobbed the whole way. His body was so stiff and skinny he weighed less than a sack of oranges. I didn’t really know how much I loved him when he was alive. He was so fucking annoying most of the time. Life’s funny like that.”  

He pulled a crystal out of his pocket, one he picked up last Sunday at the flea market. I didn’t recall him putting it in there that morning. 

“Anyways, I’m this 20-something brown kid absolutely sobbing, sputtering, burying my childhood dog in a patch on this trail. All I’ve got is a shovel with me. I’m having this private moment, you know, saying goodbye to this dog who has been in my life longer than any of my family members, and that’s when I see the police officers. Two of them, approaching me, eyes like bullet holes.”  

David sat down in the grass. I followed his lead, our kneecaps touching.  

“They’re all like, ‘hands up’ and ‘what’s going on here,’ and I’m standing there with a shovel and a glob of snot probably dribbling down my lip. I tell them I’m just burying my dog, who died last night, and one looks like he believes me and one doesn’t. He goes, empty your pockets. I do. I have nothing but my house keys. He says show me where you buried it. I point. He takes the shovel and scoops up the dirt till Charlie’s snout is showing. The other cop looks like he’s going to puke, the one holding the shovel drops it and mutters an apology, tells me to carry on.” David laughed a little as he said this, but only a little.  

“I hope he remembers that. Using his authority to do nothing but uncover a dead dog.”  

I was too young to know what to say to this. I dislike the police the way the world carves out for girls like me. He disliked the police in the way the world makes him. Mostly I felt bad for David. I felt bad for him frequently.  

We stood up and made a nice bouquet of flowers, mostly weeds, to house the crystal at the base of the tree for Charlie.  

I don’t remember what we did the rest of that day. It’s funny what sticks, since the whole dead dog ordeal was a passing thought on the way to our actual plans for the afternoon. It’s hard to peel and pick apart what I remember of those summer months with David. It was all so lazy, so beautiful it’s hard to look at. All that green, all that orange.  

I told him once after sex that I felt like his body was a wooden house in which his soul lived, and I walked right inside and started leaving handprints all over the windows, turning over all the objects on the shelves. I never had to knock. The front door opened like a breath inside one’s chest.  

He told me once after sex a story about a Mexican cowboy who burned down his desert town and went off into the night, burning down every town he came upon. Told me that he’s always been that cowboy in his mind. “And I’m the horse?” I asked, my crescent breast pressed into his shoulder.  

“No,” he gripped my wrists, “you are the fire.” 

The dream I had last night was the first time I have seen him this year, the first time I speak to him in months.   

My friends didn’t like him. My parents hated him.  

My mother would cry when I would leave to spend the night at his house. My mother and I have always been so close; there were no lines between us. Until David entered into my life and I into his.  

He texted me once that he has recurring dreams of flattening mountains, rebuilding them stone by stone, writing poems on each rock in my honor. In the name of the insurmountable love he felt for me. 

My mother used to bring home plastic bags of green grapes in the summertime. We would sit on the porch, sun bouncing off the fullness of their acidic skins. Depending on the time in the season, they would be sweet and tender or sour and crisp. We’d pluck them from their branches and take turns crunching. Laugh at the awe on the other’s face at a particularly sharp crack. Always, always, at some point my mother would grin and whisper, “That was it. That was the best one.” She meant it was the sweetest one in the whole bunch. She was certain of it. I had no reason to believe her, how could I if not to experience what only she could hold in her mouth?  

The grapes stopped being sweet by October and my mother stopped crying when I went back to college. My friends told me to leave it alone, to let him go. They thought he was strange. Twelve years, they whispered to each other. They thought he was dangerous. Their eyes pleaded with mine to see what they saw, their soft-voiced concerns of differing maturity—different life stages. How could they be certain? How can they know for sure from the outside?  

One of the nights before I left, we laid beneath his comforter and watched the rain beat down outside the sliding doors. His cat like an organ between us. When I looked at him, I felt shut out. I told him that I was trying the knob to the house on the inside, and it was locked.  

I wasn’t really then, shut out. I would know for certain when I was.  

David was adamant that the twelve years between our ages meant nothing. He was old enough to know and to reassure me of it. I was wise beyond my years, aged and clarified by a life inside a barrel. I wanted to believe him. Most of my limbs were consumed by him. A small well behind my left lung reverberated with a haunting feeling, not an ache, more like the sound a wet finger makes when dragged across the rim of a glass. The space recalls I was sixteen, seventeen, when he first laid eyes on me. I am still not the age he was when he saw me back then, with my skin key lime green, a springtime girl, a soft tearing layer fleshy with pulp.  

The peepers screamed the night I drove two towns over to his house, drunk. He left the party I brought him to without saying goodbye to me. That was the real wound— that he had left. He had left and it propelled me full of liquor down Route 7, and I let myself into his house through the sliding door, the tears cutting through my concealer, the keys still in the ignition, and he yelled at me for being so stupid, so childish to do such a thing.  

I can only think about the age difference as a physical expanse, a wide stretch flat and loose like bedsheets, myself looking across and him staring back, not knowing how to get to the other side.  

The last text he sent me was “You’re a really wonderful person, but I really don’t like who you’ve become.”  

I leave letters in unturned crevices of his home, with no intention of being found. I lay out on the dock and sing to the pampas grass. I dog-ear the books in his bedroom. My jewelry on the nightstand, my paint on the dining room table.  

He cries in my arms and tells me how my kindness is endless. He has never known someone like me. 

I wonder if he pulls into the driveway and a part of him wishes I’m waiting in the hammock, boots slung over the side, the neighborhood stray thumping his tail beneath my hand.  

I think often about where I would have taken us to be buried. I dream more often of the weight of the dirt, that blackness, my throat full of soil, the taste of it so thick and so saccharine.  

I don’t know why we are given things with meaning when we are so young. To be given them sometimes because we are young, and that alone is our cross to bear. To have to bury the dog where you loved it, to be shown a heart only to understand the weight of it years down the line. To hold something unknown only to look back and say, yes, yes, I believe that’s what it was. The taste will leave your mouth. But the clarity never quite solidifies. The edges stay softened, no matter which way you look at them.