mourning sentence

I don't really understand how the heating system works in this house. It has a grand feeling of redemption.

Last winter, there was a piece of cardboard nailed over the vent into my bedroom from the previous summer. Every night, I would go around the house and collect every single blanket I could find and layer them onto my bed and curl beneath them as the frost collected around my window and it was hell getting out in the morning. It never got warmer as the night drew on, I just fell asleep cold and woke up cold and would lie there for an hour each night imagining what hypothermia feels like and if I would really wake up the next morning or just freeze there. It only got better when spring came and the ground defrosted along with my sense of purpose.

I could've removed the cardboard.

I could've asked for more blankets.

But this winter, there is no cardboard over my vent. And, as if making up for lost time, my room is a furnace. It's almost like the heating system feels bad for me, letting me freeze through last year, and has to give me double the heat required for the entire house in my one small room.

It feels like an incubator at night. I dress like it's summer and hide only halfway under the blankets and hear the rush of the heat barreling towards me and I never told anyone about this problem because it's not a problem. It's bliss. It's serendipity. It's apricity.

Mornings are the best. The heat comes on and off hourly and at around six it bursts through and fills the room and is delicious. Absolutely delicious. Mornings are the best. I love broken heating systems.

My parents were gone all week and last night the three younger kids spent the night at their cousins' house. My sister slept in our parents bed and I slept in mine. It was just the two of us and we could have thrown a party or something but, after taking care of little kids all night long for a week, nothing sounded better than one night of good sleep.

This morning, my sister opened the door at eight and turned on my lamp and said, "God, it's warm in here. I love how warm your room is. I'm gonna go make coffee."

I was just in the space between sleep and awake and thought to say "It's like heaven on earth," but by then she was gone and it's not quite like heaven. Heaven is not what the heat in my room is. Heaven is not apricity. It cannot always be such a thing, because sometimes heaven is sad. Heaven makes people scream at the sky and makes children cry. Heaven is where you go as a reward from a nice life, even though people don't really want to leave their nice life anyway, if they had the choice. It cannot always be helpful, because of course it's a nice comfort and a nice hope for some, but not for all those left behind to live alone. When those left behind and those passed on cannot touch, when all this time they were each other's afterlife, heaven can be a sword to their wrists.

That thought is much too sad.

I remembered, as I lay there, sitting in Social Studies and learning about Buddhism. And I asked why Nirvana was such a good place to go, and if reaching enlightenment meant the end, why would anyone try to find it? Endings are so sad. And the teacher tried explaining that the core belief in Buddhism is that Life is suffering and I said without thinking, 

"But it's not."

And then I tasted the words and remembered the winter when I slept in the cold, and when I went around school one day asking people if they were happy, honestly believing that everyone was hurting together and was just pretending to smile, pulling it off like actors in a play. I remembered how every single person I asked meant it when they said they were happy. And all I could think was that they were fooled, that they were manipulated, that it was some sick maniacal coping mechanism, happiness. How can you be happy when there is garbage in the bellies of birds and harpoons in the bellies of whales and "pellets of poison flooding [our] waters" and when things are as bad as they are? The world is insane to smile. 

Life then was suffering. Life was blankets that never got warmer. Life was garbage in the bellies of birds and sorrow in the bellies of children. Life itself was painful desire and only death was hope.

I felt the heat begin to fill the room and rolled over, still holding on to the last thread of sleep. I thought about nirvana. I thought about hope. I thought about how proud I was to taste that stupid classroom comment, "But it's not." It isn't. Not when life is pancakes in the morning and pretty letters in the mail filled with new hope and new names. Not when life is handkerchiefs with cats on them and playing a cello for someone for the first time since the recital years ago where you cried. Not when you're lying in the grass in autumn and the birds are chasing the storm coming in and the leaves are falling down and a baby is sleeping on your chest as the skies close in.

Not when there's a piano being played with crooked pinkies and a heartbeat thrumming against its garage door beneath your palm as its rhythm fills your bloodstream and raises your pulses to match the same time signature.

Life is not suffering when the heat comes on and the door opens and the light hits your eyelids and your sister sits in your spinney chair and sets down her coffee and says, "It's so warm in here," and, after all the things you could have said of heaven, the first sentence as your squint and stretch and open your mouth is

"It's basically Nirvana."