This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

They all thought they could, but they just didn’t want to admit it. 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. That their simulation of losing their spouse is just the same as my real loss. I could see it when I caught them looking at me. Wondering how it would be for them.

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.

With every moment the floor shifted under my feet. The world was pressed against my nose, too close to see. I had no story to follow. My favorite character was gone.

I could feel your absence like a pulse running up and down the right side of my body where you were supposed to be sitting, your head on my shoulder.

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

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

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.

This made me feel guilty for dreaming about the dead 😅

Your absence felt less like nonexistence and more like we were both in the same house but in separate rooms, cut off by the flimsiest door.

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.