This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

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. It felt like freedom, actually.

Or the time I wondered out loud if it wasn’t our duty as smart people to have children to offset the mouth breathers churning out kids every year, and you floated the idea of getting divorced so I could take on this noble cause unimpeded, because you didn’t feel like lugging a living thing in your womb just to have to care for it once it was out.

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.