This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s like being at a party and the one friend you know is suddenly gone.

In this world we struggle and bitch and fail and hurt and then weep over someone checking out of it all.

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

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

Stunned by your death, unable to believe it, of course they’d construct some fantasy where you were alive and reassuring them, because even in death your obligation to other people wasn’t finished.

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.