Trabocco: A Subconscious Elegy

My friend had just passed. I moved because the days kept moving.

I went far. I went wide. I went nowhere.

Now a soul. Now a shell. Now all the spaces in between.

The birds were overhead. Not all the birds circled. Just one.

A brown pelican. Not the kind you frame. Not majestic. Just there. Gray-brown feathers frayed at the edges like a coat worn too long. Rust and bone and the grey of a sky that can't decide whether to rain. Three colors that don't belong together but here they are. Here I am.

It didn't soar. It pulled. It gave. It moved the way a body moves once it has agreed to the wave. Up and through. Down and on. Not high. Not low either. At times it steadied. Sky drift. Music.

Its head tucked low into its shoulders. Wings heavy. Deliberate. Each stroke a small argument with the air, and still it kept the beat. I watched it and something in me went with it. Not after it. With it. Not resting. Moving.

The way something keeps moving because the moving is what keeps it.

The wind didn't care. But the grass seemed to remember the weight of its shadow.

It flew alone.

The others had scattered earlier. Gulls. White and mindless, fighting over something shiny near the dock. But this one stayed. Or returned. Or maybe it had never left. Maybe it had been circling something invisible while I stood there pretending to be still.

The sun was behind it. Not golden. Not kind. Just there. A flat white light that erased the horizon and made the bird a cutout, a shape with no depth. Just wings and the space between them.

I watched its feathers catch the light wrong. Not shimmer. Not gloss. Just the dull sheen of something that has spent its life in wind and salt. No time for preening. Just motion. The edges of its wings were ragged. Missing barbs. Small tears. The kind of wear you don't notice until you're close enough to see that even birds fray.

One wing dipped lower than the other. Not a problem. Just a preference. Or a memory. Or the slight drag of an old injury that healed crooked and learned its own rhythm.

The sky is wider now, as if it had to stretch to make room for him.

Its shadow moved across the grass. Not the fresh dirt. The old grass. The grass that had been there before my friend, before me, before the hole. The shadow didn't linger. It passed. But the grass remembered. Not the shape of the bird. The weight of what moved above it. The pressure of something passing that could have landed but didn't.

I stopped. The stone. His name. It caught me.

I read the letters slow. Cut deep. No ink, just the white of cut. I put my fingers in them, traced the grooves, felt the echo of the saw. Warm. The stone was warm.

I felt my friend in the letters. He'd worn that name for years. Now the stone wore it for him.

And in one spot, polished, not carved, the surface caught my face. My eyes inside his name. My reflection living in the letters, in him, in the inanimate. In all of us. The stone a mirror. The mirror a grave. The grave a face I recognized.

Some of his letters build my name. Returned me to it. We are one.

The stone spoke in carved letters.

Is there anything that really doesn't have a name.

His hair was thin. Brown.
Not the kind you describe in poems.

The kind you notice only when the sun hits it from the side and you see the scalp beneath. He wore shades. Always. Even inside. Even when it rained. Not to hide. Just to soften. The world was too bright for him. Too sharp. The shades were his permission to stay in the room without flinching.

I used to think they were just sunglasses. Then I started noticing the film. That thin, scratched layer over the glass where dust collects and fingerprints fade into ghost residue. That's where he lived. In the static. In the tiny white noise of light breaking against a surface it couldn't quite penetrate.

His shades weren't dark. They were tired. Brown-tinted plastic, the kind you buy at a gas station when the sun is too much and you need a pause. Not expensive. Not stylish. Just between. Between his eyes and the world. Between the glare and the flinch.

I used to watch him clean them. Slowly. With his shirt hem. Circular motion, then a breath, then another circle. Not to see better. To see softer. To let the light in without letting it cut.

The static wasn't damage. It was a filter. A thousand tiny scratches catching the day and breaking it into something he could hold. The light went in bright and came out changed. Softer. Lower. Not gone. Just bearable. The way grief becomes bearable. Not gone. Just carried.

He was teaching me. I didn't know it then. I know it now.

When he died, I pulled his shades out of the overnight hospital bag. Still scratched. Still holding the ghost of his breath from the last time he cleaned them.

I put them on.

The space between things became the thing between spaces.

The world changed register.

Not dark. Not quiet exactly. Just lowered. The edges softened. The sky stopped pressing. The grass, the dirt, the bird with ragged wings. All of it pulled back just enough for me to stand there without breaking stride.

That's when I understood.

The light doesn't die in the static. It learns another way to move.

At the grave. I thought about that staying there. Watching the pelican pull itself across the sky.

He would have liked this bird. Not for what it was. For what it kept doing. For the fact that it kept flying even though its wings were ragged and it flew alone and the wind kept changing its mind.

The sky was wider now. I didn't notice it happen. But somewhere between the last time I saw him and this moment, standing over fresh dirt, the sky stretched. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just a little more room at the edges. As if it had to expand to make space for wherever he went.

Not heaven. Not that. Just more sky. More silence between the clouds. More blue that doesn't need a reason to be blue.

One feather fell. From the pelican. Or from another bird. Or from nowhere. It spun once, twice, then landed on the fresh dirt. Brown. Frayed. Light as a breath.

I didn't pick it up.

I just watched it lie there. A small witness. A thing that fell from something that kept going.