This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

“I just don’t think about it,” you said. “We die and that’s the end. No heaven. No hell. Do not collect two hundred dollars.”

So, your body sat in a casket in front of an altar, for a bunch of people who didn’t matter to gawk at and pray over.

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.

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

The first couple times people told me you had visited them and told them you found peace, I smiled and said something about how reassuring that was, but inside I was ripping the wallpaper off my skull.

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. At the same time, I waited for my own dreams. By all means, brain, delude me. But you never showed. No assurance that you were okay, no floating away in a ball of light, no guarantee that we would see each other again.

The way he showed people he loved them was by finishing their basement or changing their brakes.