broken white tiles. (written in late 2005)
You were crying on the bathroom floor. Hunched over, on your hands and knees, your hair kept falling into your eyes. It never occurred to you that you could tie it back.
This was the first time.
“I’m always too weak when I’m with you,” he mutters.
The door slammed behind you, closely followed by the muffled sound when the body hit it in mid stride. With a certain frustration and desperation, you kicked back with your foot and yelled,
“Gooooo! Go AWAY!”
“Are you…are you certain, because I’d do-“
“Argh, no, I just! Just…GOOOOO. I need to be alone.”
Paus.
“Do you understand?”
“Um, yeah, sure. I’ll just…be in the living room.”
This was the only conversation taking place around the bathroom where you went to cry.
There was a chip in one of the tiles; you think it was the third time you were in there that you noticed.
Then it became something to pick on while you were coming up with
more ways of staring into space. You had that down to an art after the second time.
He died on a Thursday.
He- he, he died on a Thursday. In the afternoon. You were putting away
the milk when he did. Or at least that’s what you think you were doing, because there
was this chill suddenly covering your body that didn’t come from the refrigerator.
You’d frozen with your hand hovering over the shelf and your eyes gazing at
the ingredients declaration on the caviar tube. He hated caviar, and you only bought
it to watch him watch you in disgust as you smeared a large dollop of it on your
sandwiches in the morning. You didn’t understand what it said.
At this point he’d been sick for too long, and so you hated yourself for all that just seemed to break inside of you when he finally found peace. Now he could converse intellectually on the “re-invention of the literary genres” without ruining his arguments by coughing up his lungs and sprinkling the sheets with drops of blood (oh love, it doesn’t matter, I’ll just change them, no big deal, love), and so you had NO RIGHT to feel this way. You really had no- so what if your hand never quite stopped shaking? It didn’t matter to you when a 100 pair of eyes bore witness to your breakdown in the pasta aisle at Wal-Mart’s (this was before you saved up your crying for the bathroom downstairs). He’d found his painless freedom and you’d suddenly gotten yours too.
The funeral was over and you were running from the wonderful new life without
responsibility. The door slammed behind you, followed by the muffled sound when the
body hit it in mid stride.
Something must be seriously wrong, because your eyes had never quite hurt like this, and you needed to redo the beds because someone (you couldn’t quite remember who) was staying over and then he was dead, and why were your cheeks wet? Your hair was falling into your eyes and obscuring your vision as you bore your nails painfully into the bright green plastic ducky and thought that you had never quite loathed anything as much as you loathed this ducky. A few minutes later any emotion you might have felt besides this grief was no longer, as you hung your head and cried harder than you’d ever done before in your entire life.
This was the first time. You vaguely recall the taste of bile in your mouth, the hair plastered and itching on your cheeks, the raw feeling in your throat and that several times you choked on your own tears. You don’t remember the ducky.
You would have been happy if you’d gone to Egypt and looked at the pyramids and one
of you had posed as a mummy wrapped in toilet paper in front of the other tourists.
You would have been happy if you’d gotten to visit the diner where the seats squeaked
and the waitress would have flirted with him because he always got that but it
didn’t matter, because you got him. You would have been happy to drive across a
state and listen to “Let’s talk about sex” on repeat. He was Salt and you were Pepa.
You would have been happy if you’d finally talked about his mother. You would have
been happy if you’d gotten to touch his wrist one more time.
This is all the things you never got to do, and they will always live on inside your heart.
You had been happy when he sat down in your lap in front of complete strangers. You had been happy when he almost whimpered out his weak “I’m in love with you” that very first time. You had been happy when you later heard she had slapped him and called him a shithead who should go talk to you before everything was ruined and he hadn’t said anything back, just ran to you. You had been happy when he rolled his eyes in defeat, and when you went to visit Graceland and he’d laughed for ten minutes at all the people dressed as Elvis.
This is some of the things you remember, and they will always live on inside your heart.
You didn’t always cry in the bathroom. Sometimes it just became an impulse to sit
down and sort out everything that went on in your wonderful new life without
responsibility. Especially the fact that it wasn’t wonderful. Some days it was rather
tedious and boring, and you were ashamed that you’d found yourself more prone to
tears in the face of every goddamn small frustration after this grief entered your
life. You were now living a good life, because some had said that he was bad,
and it had never seemed this lonely before.
“God, I’m sorry to spell it out like this, but you are so amazingly boring sometimes.”
“Am not! Why do I have to be the boring one? Who says what I’m doing is boring?”
“The fact that you’re folding socks instead of doing ANYTHING else with me ("They need to be-") speaks for itself. And then,” he leans forward and cups his hands around his mouth, “it’s, well, the fact that it have gotten somewhat…repetitive in the bedroom. If you know what I mean.”
“You did NOT just say that.”
“I’m just saying! If it should happen it wouldn’t be my fault. If you know what I mean.”
You still had the scar on your belly where you had tried to crawl out of your skin
when you realized that he was gone. When you realized. It hadn’t been a real,
well, suicide attempt, just a calm in the eye of the storm when you’d contemplated
if focus would be enough to help you cast off your own claustrophobic flesh. You
didn’t know where to go when you would never get to see him again. When the
helplessness had caught up to you and you had spent 27 hours straight staring at
thin air.
You became more and more efficient at your job as time wore on. You put a lot of effort into it, and you met with your friends once a week and sometimes once more on the weekends, and you read books that you’d seen him read and discovered after the tenth attempt at “Master i Margarita” that you enjoyed it. You still sucked at doing the dishes and destroyed a sweater of yours once a month when doing the laundry wrong, but you learned how to cook a really neat lasagna and in the spur of the moment attended wine classes to find out what would be nice with it. Week 54 after he had died was the first week you didn’t find yourself crying over something like being unable to like poetry.
Maybe five years on you would have healed. The wound would have closed at least in the corners. People disappeared without a trace every day, and those left behind lived on. In some capacity. But never before had you encountered this big of a “if only…”.
If only you would have gotten to see those pyramids.
If only you would have gotten to touch his wrist again.
If only you could have felt the weight of him in your lap again.
If only I didn’t love you this much.
If only you hadn't died.
“I’m only willing to do this because I’m a fucked-up bastard. If I had only an ounce of self-preservation I would run screaming in the other direction. Because this is going to hurt so much. But ok. Ok. I love you.”