Four Weekends and a Funeral

by Ellie Palmer

“There are so few good things about the morning. The smell of fresh ground beans is the only thing that makes waking up bearable.”

“Your home is the vision board you live in. The hobby I share exclusively with elderly men and nine-year-old boys is not the version of myself I’m building toward.” “So the self-improvement books get prime real estate and this special thing you love gets shoved under the bed?”

“What about the hiking junk? Forget that shelf you wanted. I could build a display case for your trains instead. It’d be perfect.” “It’d be mortifying. I want to see the things I should be prioritizing every day, not my embarrassing secrets.” Adam shakes his head. “I don’t understand why you’d prioritize something you have to remind yourself to tolerate over something you actually love.”

It’s impossible to concentrate at work now that I know Adam biblically.

“But I’m grateful I got to spend this time with you, Alison. When I first saw you last month, a part of me knew we’d be here right now.”

“Because I was asleep—in this walking, talking, waking coma. And now I’m awake. You woke me up.”

This is what it will be like, I think, this is what being in love with him will be like.

Mrs. Lewis grabs her husband’s sleeve. “Richard, you’re a doctor. Do something!” “I’m a podiatrist!” It’s the last thing I hear before I fall underwater too.

His words are a blow to my gut. I want to fix this, but a toxic combination of defeat and frustration drowns my system. Because despite his words on this porch, we didn’t fall apart today. He never gave us a real chance.

For the first time, possibly ever, I have no words. I don’t know what to say or how to fix this.

“I can’t be with you when you’re so determined to be someone else.”

“I’m always me when I’m with you.”

I don’t let myself think. I just do. I woke up this morning with energy that needed to be expended and a bone-deep desperation to be the woman I’m supposed to be.

Adam’s wrong. I’m not being someone else. That better, more worthy someone is me.

Never underestimate the brutality of a Midwesterner near discounted outdoor equipment.

“I’m not going to die in a bus. But if I did, at least I’d know I really lived.” My mantra sounds dramatic and disturbed even to my own ears.

“You know how else you can live? By living. Come on, we’re going to eat waffles.

“I love you, but there’s only so much trauma I can withstand before noon on a Sunday.”

Collapsing onto the floor next to a circular sale rack of performance vests, I clutch the source of my devastation on my way down: a fucking denim-khaki reversible jacket.

I’m crying on the floor of an outdoor retailer over a men’s jacket.

You had a scary diagnosis and made the decision to take control of your life at a pretty big cost. You want to talk about earning things? You did something hard and brave, and you have more than earned the life you have.”

We eat too many waffles, and I’m consumed by that fizzy, silly feeling I only have around my best friends—that intoxicating invincibility of being known, understood, and loved as the most beautiful, brilliant idiot the world has ever seen. No one else, not even Adam, could make me feel so lovably ridiculous as these two weirdos.

Grief and joy grip my insides, because Sam didn’t keep that chip because it was an Instagrammable thrill that fit his “nomad aesthetic.” He kept it because it was real. He kept it to remember a great day with a good friend. He was a collector of great days, and I could be too, if I could admit that my happiest days haven’t been any of the adrenaline-fueled ones.

Why am I forcing these grand adventures like I googled “how to Eat, Pray, Love your way through Minnesota” when my best days are filled with contentment?

Without my self-imposed pressure to make this hike the key to my enlightenment, the surrounding bluffs become what they always were: a beautiful, cold place to spend a day with one of my best friends. And Russell.

She tells the kind of stories you’d share at the funeral of someone very old, where guests are capable of celebrating a loved one’s long, full life, rather than dwelling on the unfairness of a shortened existence in a numb stupor. It’s as lovely for me as it is cathartic for her.

Slumping deeper into my pizzas, I lean my forehead against the window with such helpless melancholy, I put my inner high schooler—the one who wrote sad, strange poetry in pastel gel pen—to shame.

Every time I get on a plane to Michigan, I tell myself this will be the visit when I don’t regress back to my seventeen-year-old self. This year, I couldn’t make it past the ride from the airport.

But you know what was so much more terrifying than owing a debt to the universe? Realizing it’s all random. And that’s the truth, there’s nothing to pay or prove. We’re all just living.”

“You don’t need to prove you deserve your life to me or anyone. You deserve it, because everyone does. When they die or get sick or have to get a mastectomy, it’s not because they deserve it. It’s not fair, and it’s random. There’s nothing we can do other than live how we want to live.”

“How am I supposed to know if any time is a good time for anything? Does anyone? You just have to make the choices that feel true to the life you want and hope like hell it will all work out.”

Adam was right. I’m sick of hiding the things that make me happy under my bed.

“What?” “Nothing, I just love that. It’s such a you opinion.” “Delightfully misanthropic?” “Grumpy,” I answer. “And something I might agree with but would never say out loud.”

For years, I’ve been sort of…hiding, I guess? So stuck in my life and so afraid to try again and fail.

I’m no stranger to guilt. It’s my favorite feeling.”

“Not my favorite as in ‘most enjoyed,’ but I seem to prefer it over feeling anything else. I don’t know. Maybe I enjoy it a little. So many emotions want you to just sit and feel them until they go away. Guilt demands action. You have to atone for it. It tells you exactly what it wants from you. Sadness doesn’t do that. At least it doesn’t for me.” “You sound like my therapist.”

I wouldn’t let myself be sad because what kind of asshole feels sad after escaping cancer? Deserving people feel grateful. Deserving people survive and go climb mountains and live life to the fullest. I grabbed on to that last one and ran with it.”

“Rather than figuring out how my new body fit into who I was before the surgery, I created a new personality: someone worthy of a second chance. Because an introverted couch potato couldn’t possibly deserve it.

I’ve come around to the idea that I might not be cut out for sucking the marrow out of life, and it might be okay to just be myself.”

“There’s no one else like you,” he responds, his voice a secretive hush. “I don’t want to torment myself anymore. And I don’t want to feel sad, but I am. Whether I like it or not.”

“Night.” “Night,” I say, and hang up the phone, already impatient for our next late-night call.

I don’t hear from Adam again after our late-night Christmas call. I considered reaching out at midnight on New Year’s Eve, hoping this would be our new thing—emotional late-night phone calls on bank holidays, and by Memorial Day we’d be making declarations of love—but I fell asleep at nine p.m.

I’m at Chelsea’s apartment before our trivia tournament, and I can’t resist showing off my personal growth to her and Mara.

“Taking to the woods is always a cry for help,” Mara says from the hallway. I lean against the tufted headboard. “But in movies it’s always a positive thing.” “No, in movies it’s the wake-up call to get therapy. They never choose to stay in the woods for eternity.

“Your movie was never the ‘take to the woods’ movie. It was a ‘buy a house in a quaint Christmas town and learn to love yourself with the help of quirky strangers’ movie,” Chelsea explains.

“Mara, I promise you, we’ll do everything in our power to decimate the competition.” “Thank you, Al. I needed to hear that from you. I was beginning to question your commitment.”

Sam was always right about me. I was so determined to see it as a negative thing, but he saw how right I was for someone he loved.

I’ve only recently started accepting myself for who I am—a nippleless homebody who’s as deserving of life as anyone else. And Adam’s still stuck in his rut, by all accounts.

I’m done making excuses for why I can’t have the things I want, because I know what I want.”

“I love you. I love that you love trains and hate my music. I love that you listen to Christmas songs way too early. I love that you snort when you find something truly funny.”