Orbits
Love, loss, solitude, and skiing in circles.
We trace circles within circles, our skis cutting the snow. We are unfinished, looping through winter as long as the snow will hold us above the surface of life. As long as the mountain keeps calling us back, we return to orbit alone, together. Overlapping, intersecting, tracing back.
My husband and I travel at different velocities. I lose sight of him, lose myself in the sifting crystals, cease to be, cease to recognize time freezing and unfreezing. All this, I do with the faith that our concentric paths will repeat, reconnect, coincide. He will ski up behind me checking I’m still breathing one frosted breath after the next. Or I will spot him as only I can. Across a field, through the trees. Or there, on the other side of a river whose water is at once in multiple states of running and standing still.
I’ll know his outline blackened against the snow — without face or colors, coming or going. I’ll catch his lurching gait as he glides over everything. The arm once broken at the elbow that never completely unfurled again, the leg splintered in so many places, those unique traces in the snow only he can leave behind.
There are others I’ve come to recognize from afar — friends we glimpse when our orbits intersect on the fragmented surfaces of this plane. Whose shadows and gaits are also imprinted on our inner landscapes. So what if we are hurtling through time and space on diverging trajectories? This is where we will find each other — in light and shadow, in sun refracting off the chaotic prism of snow.
Sometimes with the dearest, we arrange for our paths to cross. Slip out the cell phones and send out the waves. So when my husband sees a call from a longtime friend, he escapes into the veranda saying, “I’ve got to take this, we’ll make plans to go skiing.” And I’m happy he’s going to cross paths with his old friend.
But I’ve failed to catch the thawing feel in the air — and when I follow my husband moments later to hear what news, I see only the face of loss and incomprehension.
I recognize it— the discovery that someone you love is gone and that you will never again retrace their orbit. Not on the snowy circuit, not around the salted streets in town, not in waves traveling through the phone. Not on this melting earth.
His words rise up wavering, forming clouds in the cumulous, he is telling his friend’s wife, “Anything we can do… Anything.”
But I already know, having been on the other side of this call, that she is whispering, “nothing, nothing.”
We can only witness the words as they turn to mist. I’ve been where she is, where the world is shifting from its solid-state and beginning to flow.
Somehow, and impossibly, there was a time when the worlds reversed, when I had to reach out over the rippling waves and tell these same friends their orbits would not be crossing my husband’s — not for dinner or for a frosty glide over the surface of things.
All I could do was explain that realities had shifted — and I had only the inscrutable, fractures, collisions, and the suspended state of an artificial coma to offer them as explanation.
And they had nothing, nothing to offer me in consolation.
We do not tell our (still young) children that my husband’s friend has evaporated from the loops and circuits. While skiing, with his daughter — now a young woman. We don’t say that he, a man with fewer revolutions around the winter than my husband, has disappeared into the snow from which he came. Swept off by the frozen loops of his own coronary landscape.
Only when the children are asleep, when the stars in the night sky reach for us with frosted fingertips, when the snow begins to crust over after a long, melting day do we ask the question:
“Shall we ski tomorrow?”
And then we flow into sleep and dreams that revolve around each other, freezing, thawing, crystalizing, reflecting.
Dawn is adrift in cloud. Everything is blurred in misting rain. What could be worse than skiing in wet circles and grieving your friend who has just reminded you that, we exit in mid-orbit?
Within the infinite possibilities and paths we could trace, only one is unthinkable: not etching circles into the snow that is left.
And so, we slide in silent orbit again, still, stopping now and then to wipe the rain from our glasses. To move, to revolve around each other in this place still frozen enough to keep us from sinking through to the mud below. And, somehow, we continue to cross paths with those who have evaporated. We glimpse them through the trees with snow dripping off them or beyond the mist of a river waking up for the spring. We feel them just behind us, sweeping up to check if we are still breathing in and out, inhaling the mist they’ve become.
Before we stop, I take one last revolution to sample a tiny circuit at the base of a mountain where I imagine bringing my children. A place of bumps and small hills, twists and turns — I can already see them tracing their own small circles here.
There is nothing I love more than skiing with my son and daughter. And soon, comes a day where the light of the world shines back on us from the snowscape once more. I set out again, still over the sparkling fields with the only two people in this world whose orbits have not yet split from mine.
In the shade, under a stand of larchwoods, I glide just ahead of my five-year-old son, who is just learning to fly above the snow.
He cries out, “Mommy, you’re going faster than me. Don’t leave me alone.”
Never, I want to say. Whoever drifts ahead slows down, circles back, pauses to contemplate the crystals on the frozen and refrozen field.
But my mind is drifting faster than our bodies, up the paths we don’t yet travel together, alone. Higher to the valley that will still be frozen for many months to come.
“One day you’ll be the faster one. Maybe you’ll ski in bigger and bigger circles around me, knowing I’m always here somewhere in the snow. Maybe you’ll find me from time to time.”
I trace a circle and nestle in behind him. Following close, my tracks mingling with the etchings of his tiny skis as they cut into the snow, forming our common orbit.
© Trisha Traughber 2020
Thank you for reading.
Notes:
As I wrote this piece, it was really soothing to listen to this music (for grief) by Montana Cellist. And it probably affected the shape of this piece as well — listening to different kinds of music as I write is something I’ve started experimenting with since LB mentioned it…in a post? or a comment?
I was inspired to try doodling over the top of my photos by Mark Starlin.
As for what’s true and what’s fiction, let’s call it creative memoir or auto-fiction. All I know is that this is the only story I could write this week.
