conditional mood

Leo's birthday is this week. Sometimes I use phrasing like "would have been this week", but death can only change the mood of the verb as much as the mood of the speaker. It would have been his birthday had what, exactly? Had he not died he would still have occasion to celebrate living? That's a reasonable defense of the conditional if you contour the celebration around the celebrated. But dying is predicated on having been born in the first place and doesn't alter the fact of life having happened, so my mood is indicative.

This morning I had bagels with the dogs, then we hiked on the Appalachian Trail, three hours out and back. We passed one couple in the parking lot, who helped direct me to the trailhead, and another early on the trail, who passed with their dog. A man with trekking poles stepped onto a lookout where we were taking pictures, and we passed a couple laying in the shade in the grass near there on our way back. I spent the time between encounters offering my thoughts to the trees, Orestes washing his hands on his way to the temple of Athena. In search of resolution, not judgment, I also offered thanks to the forest for receiving what I shed.

We stopped at Leo's parents' after the walk. I brought them some of his clothes, and they fed me pizza and stories about the neighbors. We chatted for an hour, and I left with the dogs for the cemetery. We waited in the car while a woman cleaned a neighboring stone. We sat for a quiet moment on the bench at his site, then I spoke with him briefly. I spent so much time talking on the trail I barely had anything left to say. Sometimes even four or five words may suffice.

By the time we got on the road home rush hour traffic was subsiding, and fortunately flowing opposite the direction we were. On the drive I listened to a playlist my friends made for Leo's memorial. I call some of the songs waypoint songs because they direct me to specific memories. Sometimes the recollection is so precise and instantaneous I think of it like time traveling, the awakening of memory that at a molecular level might be indistinguishable from the seeding of the memory. The nerves were fresh then and tender to those new experiences, and the tenderness, well layered and well tended, was strengthened, reinforced, and desensitized. Understandable that, stepping out the time machine, the thought would feel like fire as it races down lines long untraced, like paths resensitized by a year's worth of accumulated dust suddenly electrified. I think I'd feel the same had I been plucked out of the car and hurled into a far away galaxy where everything was exactly as it was ten years ago in this one.

Leo used to say that funerals were for the living, a thought I leaned on at his. The whole experience of grieving, too, and all its rituals, and growing new layers of abstraction with which to touch the world were for me. First the nerves were raw, burning exposed to fresh air. I wrapped them in gauze and left them to heal like scraped skin under a scab. Now it's maintenance to prune back the scar tissue from time to time, an emotional haircut that feels cool on the scalp for a day or two. Back home I soaked a towel in lavender and eucalyptus oils and draped it around my neck, a palliative for the side effects of interstellar hitchhiking.