Loved One

by Aisha Muharrar

It was like finding out someone else was fluent in a language you thought you had invented.

But it turned out I had organized my own religion, one that relied on what I now saw as the seemingly romantic, but ultimately cruel, philosophy that Everything Happens For A Reason. Without this private logic, I was vulnerable; it was a crisis of faith.

Standing in front of the Frankenthaler painting, I was reminded of the stage festooned with blue and green twinkle lights, the fire truck pulling into the firehouse, the spotlight on Gabe, of that week in December, and wondered: What if he returned now? What if he walked right into this room? What if it had all been a brief disappearance into the wings, Gabe hidden backstage, a show trick? Come back, come back. It can’t be over. Because—and I know it sounds strange—I felt his presence in that painting. It was almost like he was back and I knew that if he had walked up to me at that moment, I would have been exactly like a fan in the crowd, cheering and stamping my feet in relief. I thought about that blond woman with the braid and wondered where she had been when she found out Gabe died and what she had done when he didn’t return this time.

I had been bracing myself for a massive upheaval. I had been waiting it out. But it wasn’t something that would pounce on you, like a wolf, hidden by night, leaping from the bushes. At least, that’s not how it was for me. Nothing took me over. I stepped forward. I met it. And then it was like a Frankenthaler painting, I became the heavily woven canvas,

and it didn’t undo me; it sank through, it stained. People passed by. They talked to each other, some were alone. Then as the hours went by, there were more and more people, like buses were dropping them off. The sun set. The sky turned pink and gold. Then blue again, darker blue, that point in the evening when the sky takes on the hue of a blueberry, before subtly sinking into black night. Everyone in the world walked by. Except one.

After I left the party, I thought about what Caroline said. It was true, I no longer looked stricken; I was better, and that was a victory, but better in this context was something else entirely. Grief was a large spectrum on a microscopic scale, and from where Caroline was standing, she could not see the gulf between better and—I don’t know—done? Healed?

Escape it, not erase it. I keep one foot on the ground, which means it’s never really a total escape, but it gets me out of my head and into my life.

Even though death happens all the time, no one could ever be a natural at this.

Sometimes I pass something that catches my eye, or ear, and I think, Gabe would love this; or remember when, together, we loved that? I pause, grateful to run into him again.