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.

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.

what they were really after was her death itself, like they were drawn to it and wanted to be part of it, leeching something out of the moment.

“Our wedding?” “Yeah,” you said, and pulled me, by the lapels, closer. “If you feel like you’re going to be alone now, you won’t. I love you, Branson. You’re stuck with me.”

Those trees that manage to grow around power lines and stay mangled forever.

It’s what we who are bereaved like to call “settling affairs,” only you were doing it for me from beyond the grave, like you knew I would be too busy trying to crawl into the casket to sweat the small stuff.

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

The weather was to be endured, not conquered.

An owl flew over the cabin and swept into the tree line. I stepped aside for you to see and then remembered you were dead.

It heard me call your name, and now it knew where I was.

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.

I wanted to believe that at some point my buddy had existed.

I’m afraid I’ll die wrong.

I was overcome with the knowledge that we were standing at the end of the universe.