— Adam Donaldson Powell

Learning Life

I.

Death and I
have had
an embarrassingly long correspondence.

We stopped introducing ourselves
years ago.

It no longer knocks.

It opens the door,
looks around,
raises an eyebrow
as if to say,

Still?

And I,
without much ceremony,

pour another cup of coffee.

We have become
bad neighbours.

Too familiar
to fear each other properly.

II.

There was a time
when I practised dying.

Not metaphorically.

I rehearsed
the subtraction.

I packed memory
into smaller boxes.

I loosened my grip
on tomorrow.

I learned
how not to buy books
I might never finish.

How not to plant trees.

How not to imagine
old age,
because old age
was a country
without my passport.

I became
astonishingly good
at disappearing
before I had gone.

III.

Then history
changed its mind.

Medicine
argued with prophecy.

Names that belonged
on memorial walls
answered the telephone.

Some of us remained.

Not victorious.

Remaining
is not victory.

It is administration.

Paperwork.

Appointments.

Pills.

The strange bureaucracy
of continuing.

IV.

No one tells you

that survival
is another diagnosis.

Everyone celebrates
the cancelled funeral.

No one notices

that the man
who expected to die

must now invent
someone capable
of living.

V.

How many times

can a life
begin again

before beginning
becomes its own habit?

How many versions
of myself

sit quietly

inside this body?

The young man
certain of extinction.

The patient.

The miracle.

The statistic.

The cautionary tale.

The inspiration
I never applied to become.

The witness.

The ghost

who accidentally
kept breathing.

VI.

People speak
of survivor’s guilt

as though guilt
were an illness.

They misunderstand.

Guilt

is love
with nowhere left
to arrive.

It is setting
too many places
at the table.

It is counting voices

that no longer
alter the air.

It is hearing laughter

so vividly

that silence
sounds incorrect.

I have lived

inside rooms

still occupied

by the absent.

VII.

Sometimes

I have mistaken

survival

for identity.

If enough storms
choose your address,

you begin introducing yourself
as weather.

Who are you?

The one
who lived.

Again.

And again.

And again.

It sounds
like an answer.

Until one morning

you realise

you have described

only the fire escapes.

Nothing

about the house.

VIII.

There is comfort

in emergency.

Emergency

has instructions.

Emergency

simplifies.

Breathe.

Wait.

Endure.

Repeat.

Life,

on the other hand,

is impossibly
complicated.

Life asks

What delights you?

What beauty
can you tolerate?

Whom will you love

without rehearsing
their disappearance?

What future

will you risk believing?

Life

has always frightened me

more than death.

Death

requires only surrender.

Life

keeps asking
for participation.

IX.

There came a morning

with no catastrophe.

No diagnosis.

No telephone call.

No blood result
waiting
like a judge.

Only sunlight

doing
what sunlight does.

It entered the room

without needing me
to deserve it.

I did not know

what to do

with an ordinary day.

I had trained

for apocalypse.

Not Tuesday.

X.

So I began

very badly

to practise living.

The way
I once practised dying.

I bought books
without calculating
whether I would finish them.

I planted things.

I learned
the dangerous art

of expecting spring.

I allowed myself

the extravagance

of next year.

XI.

I am still learning.

Some mornings

I wake

already halfway
to goodbye.

Old reflexes.

The body remembers

every alarm

that ever proved true.

Hope

still feels

slightly dishonest.

Joy

sometimes arrives

wearing borrowed clothes.

But fear

is becoming

less fluent

in my language.

XII.

The dead

do not ask me

to follow them.

Love

never demanded

such loyalty.

Perhaps

what honours them

is not

my permanent mourning

but my willingness

to keep discovering

what they were denied.

Grey hair.

Bad knees.

Terrible jokes.

Unfinished novels.

Late friendships.

Gardens.

The exquisite boredom

of decades.

Perhaps

the most faithful memorial

is not grief.

Perhaps

it is longevity

accepted

without apology.

XIII.

Death still visits.

Of course it does.

We nod.

Old acquaintances.

But it no longer

gets to introduce me.

When someone asks

who I am,

I hope

one day

I will not begin

with every cliff

from which I returned.

I hope

to speak first

of what I have built

between the precipices.

The poems.

The kindnesses.

The mornings.

The people

who know my laughter

better than my history.

XIV.

Because surviving

was never

the whole story.

It was only

the permission

to begin.

And now

after all these years

I stand

before the difficult miracle.

Not unafraid of death.

That lesson

arrived long ago.

No.

This is harder.

This is stranger.

I am learning,

at last,

with hesitant hands,

to be

unafraid

of life.

XV.

There came a day

when I grew tired

of treating my body

as occupied territory.

The virus

had lived with me

longer

than many friendships.

The clots,

the nerves,

the joints

that argued with weather—

they were no longer

invaders.

They were

the difficult family

I had spent decades

trying to evict

from a house

we equally inhabited.

Love,

I discovered,

does not always arrive

as admiration.

Sometimes

it arrives

as a ceasefire.

XVI.

I have carried

too much resentment

for this faithful,

faltering body.

I mourned

the shoulders

that once turned heads.

The narrow waist.

The effortless beauty

that youth

mistakenly believes

is character.

I searched old photographs

for evidence

that I had once

been someone

worth missing.

Then one morning

the mirror

did not ask

to be forgiven.

Only seen.

There is a beauty

that arrives

only after survival

has rewritten the face.

It cannot seduce.

It can only tell

the truth.

XVII.

Doctors

have saved me.

Doctors

have frightened me.

Doctors

have shrugged.

I have learned

to trust

their knowledge

without surrendering

my experience.

No textbook

contains

the geography

of becoming

the same patient

five different times.

Advice,

however kind,

cannot substitute

for a country

no one else

has inhabited.

There are maps

I carry

that cannot be photocopied.

XVIII.

Even those

who loved me

sometimes stepped away.

Not because

they loved less.

Because terror

is contagious.

Some people

cannot bear

a pendulum

that refuses

to choose

between life

and death.

They wanted

certainty.

I could offer

only weather.

I do not blame them.

The horizon

has frightened me too.

Still,

there are absences

that ache

long after forgiveness

has arrived.

XIX.

There is,

if I am honest,

a romance

to almost dying.

It burns away

small talk.

It grants

a terrible importance

to every breath.

It whispers

that you have seen

what others

have not.

I wore that whisper

like a medal.

Like a vocation.

Like a name.

Until I understood

that death

had been asking

for far less of me

than life.

Death wanted

my ending.

Life demanded

my transformation.

One

is an event.

The other

a discipline.

XX.

Now,

when pain

introduces itself

before breakfast,

I do not ask

whether it has come

to kill me.

We have exhausted

that conversation.

Instead I ask,

Will you walk beside me

today

without stealing

the whole horizon?

Some mornings

it agrees.

Some mornings

it does not.

Even then,

we travel together.

XXI.

And perhaps

this is

what the old poet knew.

Death,

be not proud.

Not because

you cannot kill me.

You will.

One day.

Without apology.

Without malice.

Without triumph.

But you have already

spent

your greatest weapon.

You taught me

to fear life.

You taught me

to mistake survival

for living.

You taught me

to worship

the edge

instead of the landscape.

I decline

that faith.

Take,

when you must,

this weathered body.

The virus.

The scars.

The slower heart.

The face

time has patiently

rewritten.

But leave me

this one astonishment:

that after practising

death

for so many years,

I have finally begun

to learn

life.

XXII.

They have often asked

for the whole story.

As though

a life

could be bound

between hard covers.

As though

memory

were chronology.

As though

survival

were plot.

But the story

has never belonged

to me.

It has been writing itself

for longer

than I have been alive—

in poems,

in paintings,

in borrowed voices,

in imagined lives,

in every hand

that reached

for another

after recognizing

some forgotten part

of itself.

My history

is only the wick.

Not the flame.

When I am gone,

let the facts

go with me.

The dates.

The diagnoses.

The miracles.

The disasters.

Keep instead

whatever

became possible

inside another heart

because mine

remained open

long enough

to speak.

A life

does not continue

because someone

remembers its story.

It continues

because someone,

somewhere,

finds themselves

less afraid

to live.

Then,

whether they know my name

or not,

the song

has already begun.

And perhaps

that is all

any life

was ever trying

to become.

XXIII.

For no life
ends
before
someone sings.