This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

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.

These feelings weren’t new to the world, but that didn’t stop it from feeling like they were.

I had no story to follow. My favorite character was gone.

It felt as though I’d passed over into somewhere not meant for me. A back lot to nature.

If I knew he was going to get into his life troubles, I would have skipped on the free shake. My appetite was gone and all I wanted to do was leave before he started crying and showing me pictures of his kids or some shit.

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

I was ripping the wallpaper off my skull.

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

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.

If I was left alone then there was no one for me to hate.

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.

I already loved him, and it hurt so bad to love something with you gone because you couldn’t experience this love with me.

It was claiming Brimley for itself the way everyone had claimed you. 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.

The urge to read into this picked at me and I pushed it down. Not everything had to mean something.

I’m tired. More tired than I’ve ever been. It’s in my bones. I don’t want to keep going. I don’t want to see how this plays out.”

Fear split me into two pieces. One part was a feral animal flailing in a hole out of sheer panic, the other, a disembodied voice locked in a bone cage, trying to soothe the animal enough to get it to listen.

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

the point of possession was to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly. It was hard to see myself any other way.

Only in the darkness are we ever made whole.

May we never do you justice. May there always be more to say.