This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

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

He wrote, “Sory tio and tia that Vera died but life is life.”

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.

We each quietly hoped the other would grow out of their failings but learned to talk about it when that didn’t happen.

Some of your friends pointed out my ring, that I still wear it. It never occurred to me not to. The running opinion was that it didn’t allow me the chance to move forward. What if I met someone? Wouldn’t I feel worse taking off the ring then? They seemed to put a lot of thought into this.

My wife, the only person I’d choose to sit in a car with in heavy traffic, was dead. And I didn’t want to synthesize it into something else. I just wanted to stay with the solid thing, your absence, which in its ethereal quality was more real than the other stuff.

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

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.

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

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.