Tell Me More: Stories about the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say

by Kelly Corrigan

I take three Advil and drop into the faded linen chair I used to like but has now become the chair where I sit when I have nothing left, my staring chair, my giving-up chair, my grieving chair. I’ve been sitting here a lot since Greenie died, turning to Hershey for comfort like Ms. Judy promised the girls would, watching Carpool Karaokes, making lists of things I’m pretty sure I won’t do. My lips pinch and my chest tightens. I feel tears coming. I let them, because who cares? No one is here to be unnerved or turned off by weakness.

So relatable. The "I'm alone and I can finally breakdown" moments.

“Accepting things as they are is difficult. A lot of people go to war with reality.”

This forgetting, this slide into smallness, this irritability and shame, this disorienting grief: It’s like this. Minds don’t rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it’s like this, having a mind. Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it’s like this, having a heart. Lives don’t last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it’s like this, having a life.

Knowing people takes time, which we all swear we don’t have, or some mitigating circumstance like being caught in an elevator, or war. Huddled in the foxhole, Liz and I said it all. We were judgmental and bitchy together—desperate and existential too. Occasionally, we were our highest and bravest selves, working our way through the darkest ideas. I was lucky to know Liz that well, to know anyone that well. You can’t be really loved if you can’t bear to be really known.

The first time the words pass between two people: electrifying. Ten thousand times later: cause for marvel. The last time: the dream you revisit over and over and over again.

The skin hungers for touch, from cradle to grave. “Close silence—that’s all they need,” she whispered to me.