"Five Flights" by Laura Ingram

After “The Five Stages of Grief” by Linda Pastan

It’s easy, like learning to climb the stairs after the amputation.

Five stages of grief, ten circles of Hell, How Would You Rate your Pain, but no one believes you when you say it is unbearable. Virginia Woolfe went to the river laden with stones, but hands in my pockets, all my fingers find is a hundred fine hairs plucked from your head. On my walk to Denial, I enter an elevator that only goes up, each identical floor it opens to gleaming fluorescent as yearning and populated by the nightstands of everyone I’ve ever known, pill bottles rattling with blue capsules of sleep, or aspirin, it’s hard to say—water glasses and reading glasses and wilting flowers, all things The Living acquire. No one is here, in Denial, except all of us, rummaging through drawers of darkness for some kind of cure. I find a sachet of want, tied tight in two knots at the top, filled with the pressed purple blossoms of breath.  I call out every name I can think of, but no one comes near me until I reach the entrance to Anger, down a spiral staircase made of hair and bone, into our old apartment, every surface covered in pictures of you, and me, and me and you. You are watching me through the window. I call out to you over and over, but you appear not to hear me, not even when I scream and thrash and look for something to break the glass with. You look right through me, waving my arms and sobbing and pressing my face against the cool glass. I wonder if the moment will come when you walk through the door, carrying my sorrow limp in your arms like a cat, self-domesticated. Rattling the doorknob, I know that living or dead, even if I see you again, I will never see you again. 

I pace the floor of Anger until a trap door opens underneath my scuffed shoes and I collapse into Bargaining, a circular room without windows or a roof, just high red walls. What could I exchange for you? The back garden of the house I grew up in, all four lobes of my liver, every single summer day? Before I decide the lump in my throat flies out through my teeth and snatches all I can offer with its talons. I try to follow its migration wave, but I end up back where I began, an empty building, neither warehouse nor factory nor hospital nor hotel nor home.  Depression doesn’t have its own place, just newspapers piling up in the foyer. I flip through them, every headline detailing your doom, every page dated the same day. Every day since you left is the same day. 

Your face is a color I have forgotten. Hope was my mother’s maiden name. She kept it out of everyone’s reach, on top of the China cabinet. I saw her wear it maybe once, Hope, a tight string of pearls glinting around her neck like two hands, white-knuckled, choking her. When she dies, it will continue to gather dust where she left it. Her Hope does not belong to me; rather, my grandmother’s name is my name. You were the only thing that has ever been my own, and I have lost you. 

I feel my way through the sudden pitch dark as an invisible clock chimes an unknown hour to an iron-wrought balcony, overlooking every landscape of my life, a meadow brown and brittle from first frost, fallen leaves forming a footpath and I see it now, the sign I have searched for, its defective neon flickering, Acceptance, hand-lettered like a vacancy marquee outside of a run-down roadside motel with bedbugs and hard water and little porcelain lambs in the lobby. I watch the bright word falter, come to terms with the irrefutable fact that anything that matters is a little tacky. Love is kitsch. The iron railings I am clinging to dissolve into dampness, and I tumble down into the cold ground of memory. I weep, finally, gather my skirt and come closer, no, closer, to Acceptance. There is no lock on the door—I always could have come in—just a circle of empty, mismatched armchairs like a waiting room. I sink into the chintz. Behind me, another steep staircase rises up out of the air. Grief is a circular staircase. No matter how high I climb, I have lost you.

I begin again. 

Laura Ingram is a poet and author who lives and writes in rural Virginia. Her poetry and prose have published in over one-hundred literary magazines and journals, among them Juked and Five on the Fifth. Laura is the author of six collections; Animal Sentinel, The Solitude of the Female Preying Mantis, Mirabilis, The Taffeta Parable, Junior Citizen's Discount, and The Ghost Gospels.