This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

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

At some point, everyone will be on both sides of grief. It's isolating, solitary, no one can have the same relationship with one person. No one can show up perfectly for another, and often times what's best for aomeone can't be imagined or executed except by letting go

Even before this, I had a dream that I showed up to the hospital and walked into your room and you were awake. Your jaw hung loose and a fat pale tongue writhed in the air, and you made distasteful moans, your eyes unable to focus on anything, like nothing was there, your hands curled against your wrists and waving them around. Skin like wax. The front of your gown soaked in saliva. Your mom sat on the bed with you and looked up, beaming. “My baby’s back,” she said.

Your boss wanted to know if he should put you on a sabbatical or just use the banked sick and vacation time you had accrued. “Which would she prefer?” he said.

I’m supposed to move on, get over it, let go. But it’s like having an arm amputated and complaining that you can still feel the phantom hand balled into a fist, and it hurts, and they all stare at me like monks in their Zen gardens, and say, “You have to let go.”

I get now why old cultures and native tribes kept rituals for death. You exorcised the grief with a ritual and it gave everyone something to do, a space to be sad, and after the bereaved lifted that boulder or pierced their scrotum or sipped that hallucinogenic tea, we could all agree that the dead had been sufficiently mourned. They were adequately remembered, and none of us would feel guilty for what felt like a lack of action on our part. Instead of feeling whatever this was. I feel it every day. Every day.

I just wanted to stay with the solid thing, your absence, which in its ethereal quality was more real than the other stuff.

They made me feel small and alone, but those feelings didn’t come with sadness. The herd of clouds moving over the road took the spotlight off me. In the city, around humans, I was someone. But out here, I was an ant.

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.

A part of me always dreamed of this, never having to work again, moving far away from everyone I knew. In the mountains no one was trying to gauge themselves against me. It was just snow, trees, the mountain sky, and the whipped disks of clouds above the peaks. The town below me, well within view. And full of strangers, which was what I wanted. If I was left alone then there was no one for me to hate.

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

Your stepdad arrived at the hospital, went straight to the morgue to identify Diane, and flew back home with her body without visiting me. I slept but didn’t dream.

He grabbed my hand and held it for a long time, like he needed the support or he was finding a way to forgive me in that moment. I hoped it was the former.