This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

I just like the idea of my body being completely recycled.

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

Life is life. Shorthand for Shit happens, get over

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.

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

What was worse than burying you, living in a world where I couldn’t see you, where I was locked in this basement existence? There was nothing I wanted to know anymore, except whether killing myself would bring me to you.

The drive through Iowa and Nebraska was the same as the drive through western Illinois. Pretty much as soon as I left the city limits everything on either side of the highway embankments looked the same: cornfields that gave way to rolling, bare plains.

Truth. The Midwest is a strange place. Gimme the mountains!!