She leans over our table and turns the sign in the window so that it says CLOSED on the outside. But on our side, perfectly positioned between Mabel’s place and mine, it says OPEN. If this were a short story, it would mean something.
If I could stop dreaming up a deathbed scene where his hospital blankets are crisp over his stomach and his hands are holding mine. Where he says something like, See you on the other side, Sailor. Or, I love you, sweetheart. And a nurse touches my shoulder and tells me it’s over even though I can already see it by the peaceful stillness of him. Take your time, she says, so we just stay there, he and I, until the darkness falls and I am strong enough to leave the room without him.
Close your eyes,” I say again. She closes them. I look at her. I wish her everything good. A friendly cab driver and short lines through security. A flight with no turbulence and an empty seat next to her. A beautiful Christmas. I wish her more happiness than can fit in a person. I wish her the kind of happiness that spills over. I place the bell into her open palms.
She never spent money this way, always thought she’d wait until she had a real apartment, a reason to have nice things, but it struck her, standing in the store: Maybe this was it. Reason enough. Maybe she was in the middle of it already and just hadn’t realized.
It was a summer of trying not to think too deeply. A summer of pretending that the end wasn’t coming. A summer when I got lost in time, when I rarely knew what day it was, rarely cared about the hour. A summer so bright and warm it made me believe the heat would linger, that there would always be more days, that blood on handkerchiefs was an exercise in stain removal and not a sign of oblivion.
We all looked so beautiful.
I feel like the night might last forever and I would be okay with that.
But I know that there’s a difference between how I used to understand things and how I do now. I used to cry over a story and then close the book, and it all would be over. Now everything resonates, sticks like a splinter, festers.
I know what it’s like to not want to understand.
I feel alive with the truth.
I’m trying to stay here with her in her happiness.
Knowing that they’ll grow older as time passes, they’ll become old the way Gramps was, with gray hair and a tremble in his step, so much love still in their hearts – this astonishes me. I am capsized.
But wherever in the world we live, something’s gonna get us in the end. Something gets us every time.
What happened had broken us even if it wasn’t about us at all.
She’ll still be herself and I’ll be learning who I am now.
Sometimes it’s difficult,” he says, “to know the right thing to do.
Because if we have any sense of self-preservation, we do the best with what we’re given.
I guess she needs this – for us to move on – but it feels like another loss.
To think that a girl who is practically a stranger could be the next person I love.
There are degrees of obsession, of awareness, of grief, of insanity. Those days and nights in the motel room I weighed each of them against the other. I tried to make sense of what had happened, but each time I came up short. Each time I thought I may have understood, some line of logic snapped and I was thrust back into not knowing. It’s a dark place, not knowing.
I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I’m afraid that cord of communion would snap. And then I’ve a notion that I’d take to bleeding inwardly.