July

An ominous front like a yawning mouth. Green artificial turf that covered the front hard like a golf green. Desiccated orange flowers on the side that withered into stalks.

Shift stepping through a gentle July. I’m not in touch with past ambitions, but rally hopes of a new dawn.

My knees have been aching. I’ve been walking over packed dirt hardened by the sun. The light dusting of grass gets pulled away with each pass of my feet.

There is a suffocating stillness to the time in between. When I first landed in Japan I was overwhelmed by the reality that if I chose to, I never had to return.

But I did. And now, like a ship unmoored, I find myself floating on a turbulent sea.

My mother is dying by inches. Each day a little more of the fire inside her seems to dim. People are caricatures of what they’ve been. I don’t exist much outside of her view of me as a soccer coach. There’s an easy cycle for her to ask me about my teams. How many I have and how they’re doing.

I’ve replayed it a thousand times already.

I want to throw up, but this grief isn’t something that you can expel. It clings to you like tar.

I have no god to pray to, nor lover to hold on tight. I find myself existing in a special realm of cowardice as I fear an impending death, but cannot stomach the reality.

It is the worst charade— as my family tacitly agrees to keep quiet. To play along.

Or maybe it’s a different kind of love. Because this has been an impending fate my grandmother and aunts have already succumbed to.

So we pretend— we pretend that each day isn’t another petal plucked from an increasingly sparse flower.

We pretend that maybe it will be alright.

That we are not already heartbroken before the worst break of them all.