Landing
I will start at the end and then go no further.
My notes say:
“May 16, 2021 at 12:32”
“Just a baby white heron catching fish.”
“Just a plane landing.”
Everyone has left the hotel already. The funeral is over, the graveside rituals all new. I wailed louder than anyone at the permanence. Strangers gripped my hand.
Everyone’s scattered, his husband, his best friends all already left. My flight is later.
I’m sitting by the water across the bay from the airport. I watch the baby heron learning how to fish. He stands in the shallow water and dips his head, comes up, dips again, just like those glass bobbing tabletop toys. Perpetual motion machines. He stalks over to another spot and waits and looks for a long time. He bobs his head and catches something then throws his head back and chokes it down. My eyes fill with tears.
A man comes to the pier where I am sitting and sets up a tripod and a long-lensed camera. I look over and smile because that is what I’m trained to do but he does not look at me. I go back to looking at herons. Maybe they’re egrets. I don’t know what they are because I don’t know birds or very many trees or very much at all. My friend died suddenly not of Covid not of anything just one day at the time to wake up did not wake up. Next to his husband in bed a morning that shattered the buoyancy of the possibilities in the world.
He is with me every day. I check in with him and he gives me encouragement and I see him bouncing along leaping in slow motion even sometimes surrounded by soap bubbles that either he is blowing and laughing about or that are coming from somewhere else I can’t really tell. Shortly after he died this image of him comes to my mind and I cling to it even if it glitches sometimes or zigzags out of frame because I fear.
At first adhering to the stages of grief I experienced disbelief to the point of thinking it was a very extended practical joke—until I got to the strange barren airport hotel and the room door opened and I scanned wild-eyed—all the friends he introduced me to were there but he was not. I felt like leaping behind the couch or into the bathroom to search but instead lay down on the floor.
Then anger. Now tides of sadness come in and out.
The heron dips, catches, throws his narrow head back and chokes down another fish.
I am bonding with the photographer next to me as I hear his camera clicking away. A nature photographer for sure. He must come here a lot and is clearly devoted to the birds right at this special spot. I like cameras too, I want to address him, to connect.
The shallow water is transparent and a color like chartreuse. I take a picture with my phone but it doesn’t look the same. Some seaweed drifts around aimlessly. The camera next to me exposes with intent and direction. That’s a lot of bird pix I think.
My ears tune into other outer sounds; joggers going by on the path, lapping of shallow waves on the pier. Tuning inside and outside at random, straining. Inside songs vacuumed out; nothing to hear. Dead silence.
Outside too: jet engines from SFO beyond. And the camera. I turn to look at my friend the photographer; his shutter going rapidly through electronic representations of chemical reactions. The camera doesn’t expose anything at all.
I look at the horizon; an Estonian Air plane is landing. It strikes me that my bond with heron-gazing photographer is utterly of my own imagining; he is instead a fanatical airplane portraitist and has been stopping them mid-flight with his long lens the entire time we’ve been sharing this dock.
At the time this feels very profound; a reminder that feelings of connection are invented and nearly always wrong. He does not know that my friend has died and that I refuse to believe it. And I do not and will never know what the photographer does with his hundreds of pictures of airplanes.
Thanks for reading.