This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

It was all about being responsible with the body we’d leave behind, like washing our cups and cake plates at the end of a party.

“I can’t imagine how painful this must be for you.” Yes, she could. 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.

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

oof. never thought about it that way but i will forever now

I knew right away it would have been the thing we’d have said to each other as a joke if we’d read it at someone else’s wake. Life is life. If one of us overdrew from our account. Life is life. If your mom begged you to visit her and then spent the whole time criticizing you. Life is life. If you missed the train and your phone died. Life is life. Shorthand for Shit happens, get over it.

this kid was walking around totally unaffected by it, which meant the world at large still turned without knowing your name. Without knowing your love of amortization calendars and kettlebells and the burned cheese parts sticking out of the end of a quesadilla.

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.

You were you and I was me and there was this thing between us.

I had no story to follow. My favorite character was gone.

That part of my life was over. The part that could care for another person, invest in them, it froze and then sheared off like a glacier, into the dead ocean of things I couldn’t access anymore.

A single strand is enough to make me wiggle around, reach through my collar and down the back for something I can’t place but know is there. Reaching for something ethereal until it glides between my fingers

“Maybe this thing hates it where it is. Where it’s been for millennia. Not dead but sure as shit not alive either, and it can’t get out. Maybe he’s desperate. Maybe you got something he wants, and the only way to get it is if you willingly give it up. So maybe he’s gonna have to trick you.”

I opened my eyes and only the embers were left, holding on, glowing with all that dark around us.

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.

It meant sooner or later I was going to lose you again. No matter how deformed I felt, or how hobbled I was by your absence, with time I would develop the right callus to get on with life and you would slip into the background like a hand on someone’s leg that they feel less and less the longer it stays there.

“It’s really quite simple,” she said, waving her cigarette. “Pull me out of the wall. Pull me out of the wall.” The text stopped there, halfway down the left page. The whole right page was blank. I turned to the next page and there was only a single sentence. Pull me out of the wall. I flipped again and both pages were covered in blocks of text that read Pull me out of the wall Pull me out of the wall Pull me out of the wall Pull me out of the wall Pull me out of the wall …

The fish swam and swam, looking for food, hungry, dying, and he would kill them, and they would never know the point of it all. That it was for our benefit. Our hunger, our palates. All they would know was the pain.

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.

You believed that once a person died the party was over, so you’d just be sitting in an empty space, in a self-imposed slumber. But then I’d die expecting to find you, spending all my time traversing an afterlife landscape that I make up as I go along, searching, when all I’d want would be to sit in that darkness with you, blind and mute and floating in the ink like a womb.

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.

There’s nothing she can’t access!