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Grief is a heavy thing, dense as iron, and just as sharp too. It weighs down on your bones, puts a crick in your neck, makes the skin beneath your eyes darken. Like lead it will seep into your blood and turn it cold and thick. That is why some turn to the drink, to dilute it. Others let it waste away at them when it becomes too consuming.
I can see it on John, like a vulture on his shoulder.
I walk slowly, unsteadily to him, steps in time with the nearly imperceivable sway of the ship. It was something I usually got used to, but now it is as foreign to me as a good night's sleep and the thought of a mild winter. The roll of the wooden beast is a ceaseless reminder of what we have gone through, and we are in the dark belly of it.
It wouldn’t be much better above. Two years ago I would have found myself at home in the shrouds of a mast, a shining thing in the sun. Now the thought of it makes me sick. I don’t know if it’s because I’m so weak, now, or if it is because I am afraid that I will look down and see still bodies. In my dreams I do, and one of them stands out from the rest.
I walk and suddenly John is within an arm's reach. Something in me is afraid to touch him, like he’ll disintegrate into the fog that has engulfed our lives so heavy and so noxious. If he did I would die, so I don’t touch him. Instead I call out, like we did to cut through the mist and see who was still left.
“John.”
My voice scratches out into the air like a rale, and I try to remember the last time I spoke. It seemed like none of us spoke these days, choosing instead to stare into our hands and paw at the wooden ribs of the ship and our hollow cheeks as if to make sure that we are… that we Are.
“John,” I call again, when he doesn’t respond. I pray I am not speaking to a figment.
Finally he turns, and that vulture rears its head and its wings cast a shadow over his face. He looks old, proper old. He is much older than me but it really didn’t seem like it, not until now.
“We should sleep,” I say.
“I can’t. You go ahead.”
He has his fingers to his mouth, like he’s holding some kind of secret in. Grief has ground him down into rough edges, but I can see under that he’s yielding and shapeless, like something decomposed.
“Please.”
My mind has been coming back to me slowly, in water-worn shards, and another piece returns as I realize that John is still here, I am still here, and I can reach out to him and he will still be solid and warm under my fingertips. So I do, I run my palm gently across his shoulder, and ignoring his flinch I come close to press my cheek between his stark shoulder blades.
“I can’t,” he says, the two words falling onto the ground like they’re as dense as stones.
I understand why.
I hardly remembered the shadow of my consciousness between the sled and the dark quiet of the sick bay. All I can recall is the pain, like my joints were being pulled apart by dogs and tendons snapped at by hawks. Like god was crushing me into dust under his thumb.
I lift myself from John and he turns in the curl of my arms, to look down at me. His hair is so long now, and it falls around his face like a sterling silver frame. His breath is slow on my skin. Sometimes he looks at me, as he does now, like I’m a risen ghost or something. Maybe to him I am, and he still needs to shake himself out of the nightmare that was once his impending reality, for the time that I was not there. I have asked him so many times now, of what happened, and he won’t speak of it. It’s times when he looks like this that I wish there were two of me to love him doubly. I can’t remember, but John did. I look into his dark eyes and wonder what they’ve seen, what my poor John had to hear and smell and…
He knows something I don’t, and he won’t tell me, not in a thousand years. I realize it is for the best.
“Let me, John.” I say. Let me help you, let me lie with you, let us share in the horror together so we may even the load. No one else can care anymore, we are left to ourselves.
A thought crosses his face and I know that his mind betrays him, so I take John by the hand and lead him away, into a dark corner that will do as a refuge. I sit him down and I lean against him, though any more than my own weight would probably crush him to bits. I tilt my head to see him, and I marvel that despite it all, I was fortunate enough to still have him here; any variation of him will do. Though, fortune was a strong word for a dark cold place like this. No, it felt more like I was simply spared.
We rest like this for what I think is hours, before I feel John’s hand alight on mine. For the first time in so long my chest thrums with something that feels dangerously close to hope. I squeeze his hand tight, and something about that makes him open, just a little, for me.
“Harry, if you were not here with me at this moment, I would be lost.”
The implication tightens around my throat, and I press closer.
“Don’t think of it,” I say, trying to sound brave even though I don’t feel like it. “It's not worth thinking of it. My hand, it’s warm, is it not?”
He looks at me, and I wish he would cry. I know he feels the need to be strong for the both of us, but I wish he could understand that he doesn’t need to anymore. When he speaks it comes out slowly, paced so that the pain of it doesn’t bear down on him all at once.
“And yet when I close my eyes I still see you… the frozen shell of you, your body still and your hands long cold… I was so close to losing you that this might as well have been the truth. Even now with you breathing beside me, it’s all I can think of.”
He grieves not only for lives lost, but for the happiness that has been permanently encased in the ice that was the Arctic. It drifts away from him like a floe, left behind to join the frozen pack, diminishing into the horizon as we sail.
“Then, John, when you wake by me you will be reassured anew. Every time you wake.”
In my mind I promise him: I’ll be by his side from now until when Death returns for his stragglers.
He pulls his hand from mine to instead raise it to my face, like he’s making sure that there is still blood in my cheeks. I turn my head to kiss the palm of it. His face softens a little, and I think he’s beginning to understand that we are finally returning home. It is a weak antidote, but it will do.
“Every time I wake. It feels like such a distant idea now.”
It is then I decide that I’ll bury my existence into his until that distance becomes mere atoms.