The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

There’s no doubt in my mind that my sister thinks what she’s calling me about is important, but it wouldn’t be beyond her to have seen me write something anti-Trump on social media and feel like it was a personal attack, which is a thing that’s uniquely American, in case you didn’t know. The way people there conflate their political alignment with their personal identity. Being a Republican or being a Democrat in America is for so many people akin to racial identity.

Because—honestly—neither party is great these days, and when you personalize something to the extent many people do in politics, any time anyone questions something the party does, it can feel like they’re questioning you, and that’s just plain unhealthy.

but she’ll learn quickly that losses sneak up on you no matter how many blankets and smiles you throw over them.

I don’t like people very often. You can call it self-preservation, call it a defense mechanism, call it being able to see through people and not liking what I find—I don’t know, whatever—I just don’t get crushes very often,

Childish. I know. So, so childish. But there’s something about being around your siblings that makes you regress.

I just want the truth at all costs. That’s not very breezy though. I’d like to be breezy, I think. But I’m too clever to be breezy.

And sure, maybe I’m in denial? Maybe I haven’t thought of it properly yet. Maybe it hasn’t sunk in that my dad dying is the closing of a chapter in my life I’d honestly barely read yet. But there are too many people filling the rooms, filling up the space my mind would need if I wanted to feel the breadth of death in the way it demands to be felt.

I purse my lips in contempt. Think about how being a “Christian” has so little to do with acting Christ-like now, especially these days, and especially in America. And I don’t know what I believe. I think I believe in God, but not the one people like Maryanne and my mom claim to know. I don’t know if there’s a PR team in heaven, but can you even imagine the crisis management team they’d need these days? What with people like these idiot girls with bright eyes and dull hearts, not a hair out of place but hearts in the wrong one. Girls like them who bat their eyes as they pick and choose from the Bible to create a world they’re comfortable to exist in.

“We didn’t actually grow up together.” I shake my head. “Our relationships never really evolved past the ages we left each other behind.”

She loved my dad. Loves? Loves, I think is the appropriate tense. I don’t think you just stop loving someone once they’re suddenly gone. I think that’s what makes it hard.

I know she’s trying to avoid it, hiding behind me and Oliver and being there for other people, but avoiding grief is a kind of grief. It’s what we do when we can’t feel what we need to feel to progress. I know that’s true because I do it too. I think I’m doing it right now.

“She’s in what they call the ‘numbing phase.’ It’s when everything hurts too much to fully comprehend it, so she doesn’t…” Vi gives me a long, pointed look. “It sounds familiar.” I’m self-aware enough to have already wondered whether that’s the phase of grief that I’m in, and maybe I’m in an abstract part of it, but my mother’s grief and my grief are incomparable because our relationships with the deceased are also incomparable.

“Mom’s in a phase of adaptation.” And I smirk because she’d hate the word—she thinks it’s unbiblical—but it’s true, she is. “She has to relearn her place in the world without Dad, and I don’t think she’s the sort of person who’d have thought about it much before now. So I think she’s doing okay.” I shrug. “Relatively.” I glance up at Vi. “For who she’s lost and how suddenly she’s lost him, I think she’s doing okay.”

“Make sure you’re doing some grieving too.”

We’re back at my parents’ for the wake now, and the room is too full of people who knew my dad better than I did.

“You’re in trauma,” I say to her, and swallow heavily because who the fuck wants to say that to their mother? “You’re in so much pain, you can’t even feel it all. It’s why you feel confused—confused is the most obvious thing you feel.” I point to her upper face. “The way your eyebrows pull in, you’re confused on the surface, but underneath, it’s just…” I tilt my head—it’s easier sometimes to spot emotions that way. “Anguish. And fear.”

“You want to get over someone quickly?” I stare over at him. “Feel everything. Every shred of loss, everything you’re missing now that they’re gone. On lonely nights, be lonely. When you’re sad, look it in the eye. Every single memory I had of Storm, I ruminated on them for weeks on end and it felt like I fell into a fire, and then somehow, one day, after months of pain and months of forcing myself to feel all of it, I saw a picture of him and I didn’t feel like I was going to die anymore.”

“Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” I stare up at the big arch, which is my favorite part, I think. “Even though it’s broken?” “Yep,” he says quietly, and he’s looking just at me.

“Have mine,” he tells me, offering me his mug, but I don’t notice what’s in his hands because I’m distracted (always distracted) by his face. “Your what?” “I meant my coffee, but…” He smiles. “You can have my—fuck—have whatever you want. Have everything.”

Tenny stands at the doorway, eyes flicking from me to Sam. He looks at Oliver walking down the hall, then nods toward Sam’s toothbrush. “You might want to put some toothpaste on that, man.”

The nicest thing you can ever do for another human being is see them, and really see them, at that. To be understood is one of most base desires we as people have,

Then there’s Alfred Tennyson, Marianne Moore, Mary Oliver, and George Gordon Byron. My eyes fall on a framed degree. Poetry. Cornell.

And I think to myself, wouldn’t it be so lovely if we viewed ourselves through the same lens as the people who love us?

“I recognize your pain,” Alexis says, putting his hand on my shoulder kindly, and I flick through the pages in my mind’s memory, trying to remember when either of my parents have ever done this to me. “And I do not pretend to understand it, and you are entitled to it,

He gives me a steep look. “Yeah, you’re not getting into fistfights with a sociopath on my account.” “Narcissist,” I correct him. “Oh,” He tosses me a sarcastic look and thumbs back inside. “In that case, go on back in.”