This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

It occurred to me that I couldn’t go back to crying because I had to pee, which who knew peeing could outrank grief in the brain.

I just like the idea of my body being completely recycled. It’s a clean circle of tidiness.

My friend. Before they were my friends they were your friends. The longest friendship I had before meeting you was with a leather jacket.

People cannot bear to think there are channels of human experience that are closed off to them, that they’ll never know. People want to believe their experience is universal, that nothing’s outside their scope.

What they say: call me. What they mean: it’s your responsibility to let me know when I have to care.

Life is life. You had to be so inexperienced and emotionally dulled by YouTube channels to point out such an obvious truth and not recognize the lack of sympathy that went into it.

Even with you in the news, on television, your photo in countless think pieces, this kid was walking around totally unaffected by it, which meant the world at large still turned without knowing your name.

Regardless of how it felt now, the world would sooner or later have its foot on the gas pedal, on to the next bombing, the next shooting, the latest outrage, and we’d be forgotten.

They were so quick to define you, to pin you down to something. Who didn’t like music? What dead person didn’t have a great smile? A great laugh? No one was calling you these things when you were alive. Alive, you got to be just you. Dead, they needed to encapsulate you, harness you into a favorite movie they could buy, a favorite motto they could tattoo. No one got that you were those things primarily because you were you, not because they made you.

But we still worked together somehow, like two different animals that learned to hunt as a team. You were you and I was me and there was this thing between us.

The world was pressed against my nose, too close to see. I had no story to follow. My favorite character was gone.

The part that could care for another person, invest in them, it froze and then sheared off like a glacier, into the dead ocean of things I couldn’t access anymore. It felt like freedom, actually.

They say tragedies like this bring people together. They’re right. And it’s suffocating.

I could picture them flipping through obituaries, looking for names they recognized, loading up their cars to insert themselves into someone else’s grief.

Police report talk. Not a piece of shit, but the assailant. Not my wife, but the victim.

I once read a book by a Holocaust survivor who said those who were crushingly optimistic were the ones to die first. Not killed, but died, either from illness or organ failure or straight-up fatigue. I think doctors take that approach with delivering news. Instead of dressing up your chances of recovery, they talked about the percentage of coma patients who never wake up again.

Honestly, the only retirement option I might have ever considered was sold by the caliber. You broke that cycle for me. Thank you for that. Second to I love you, that’s the thing I keep wanting to say. Thank you. Besides I’m sorry.

I get now why old cultures and native tribes kept rituals for death. You exorcised the grief with a ritual and it gave everyone something to do, a space to be sad, and after the bereaved lifted that boulder or pierced their scrotum or sipped that hallucinogenic tea, we could all agree that the dead had been sufficiently mourned. They were adequately remembered, and none of us would feel guilty for what felt like a lack of action on our part. Instead of feeling whatever this was.

There was nothing I wanted to know anymore, except whether killing myself would bring me to you.

and the fear in his eyes pulled me back into myself.

Big Lovecraftian clouds moved below the blue expanse, bigger than I could comprehend. My eyes immediately trying to categorize their shape into a recognizable form. They made me feel small and alone, but those feelings didn’t come with sadness. The herd of clouds moving over the road took the spotlight off me. In the city, around humans, I was someone. But out here, I was an ant.

I kept telling myself it was one of those things the brain does. When it sees something it can’t compute, it stretches an old reference over the thing like a costume, something you can recognize.

It was the opposite of what everyone wanted for me. They said I needed to throw myself into work, keep myself busy, not be a stranger. Friends we hung out with for years asked for my number. They just assumed I would fill the role you had inhabited for them so naturally. I’d be that person for them in their lives now. That easy.

When you died I mourned you, but also the version of myself I was with you. So there were two deaths.

The weather was to be endured, not conquered.

because even in death your obligation to other people wasn’t finished.

Seeing everyone else scramble for meaning left me cold. I didn’t allow anything in me that would make me look foolish or desperate, and I closed the door on my brain’s ability to craft a dream meant to comfort me and provide me with the only thing I truly wanted: to see you again.

The details bloomed all at once, not the way a story usually unfolded, but beginning, middle, and end all at the same time, the way stories happened to God.

it was a brutal way to learn how deep affection tunneled into an animal. To hurt him and see him come back without an ounce of scheming in his eyes.

The thought of you wouldn’t hurt as much as it did now, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that. Your parents buried your body and my brain would bury your imprint on my life. I’d rather hole up in the cabin until the trial, the wall, the world forgot about me.

My life was a series of disasters, and the aftermaths only attracted scavengers who picked the rubble for parts they could use for their own means.

What better way to get me to pull you out of the wall than to remind me of all the pain I had caused. That’s how I knew it wasn’t you.

“Grief has inured you to dumb questions.”

The fish swam and swam, looking for food, hungry, dying, and he would kill them, and they would never know the point of it all. That it was for our benefit. Our hunger, our palates. All they would know was the pain.

Passing away didn’t alleviate us from the things that made life so tedious to begin with, we were beholden to that shit even in the afterlife.

But I wasn’t scared, because dying felt like sinking into a deep, calm sea.

I’m afraid that when we die, we end up wherever we always thought we’d end up. If we want to go to heaven, we go to heaven. If we believe in reincarnation, we come back as a baby or an animal or a tree. If we think we’re going to hell, we’ll burn forever, and we’ll never realize that we were the ones to put ourselves there. That in the afterlife we all tapped into a mechanism, some larger system bent on fulfilling our personal ideas of death.

I don’t want it to be that what I believe is what matters most. I want the truth, without a brain to skew it, without eyes to filter it.

He wasn’t after existence, but death. The way a tree that grew around power lines would produce seeds that would sprout other trees with mangled shapes, the way pain and tragedy flowed through the branches of my father’s family tree,

Hidden behind the stars were terrible truths, a kaleidoscope of nightmares,

Only in the darkness are we ever made whole.