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.

Someone with your maiden name had written a message in the book, and right below it was the squiggly handwriting of a child. It clicked in my head that this was your cousin. That cousin. The one whose two boys both had sunken Richard Ramirez eyes. It looked like the oldest one was forced to write something. He wrote, “Sory tio and tia that Vera died but life is life.” It was like he reached into my head and turned off the spigot. Instead of wiping away tears, I was laughing. I was gripping the back of the pew. Life is life. You had to be so inexperienced and emotionally dulled by YouTube channels to point out such an obvious truth and not recognize the lack of sympathy that went into it. At a wake. Leaving it for the parents and husband of the deceased to read. 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. It was the kind of empty saying people shared on social media, and if I had seen it there first it wouldn’t have registered with me, but to see it in the book triggered something. I could barely breathe. The blood was heating under my face. I could feel my chest bouncing from the suppressed laughs. People were turning around. From t...

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.

At night the rooms felt sharp, lifeless, and if they were filled with anything it was that invisible hostility a person felt in their room after waking up from a bad dream.