The Honeys

by Ryan La Sala

Death isn’t the end of a life, but the division of it. When someone dies, their soul scatters into all the things they’ve ever given away. Love. Bruises. Gifts. You struggle to piece together what’s left—even the things that hurt—just to feel haunted.

Trust me when I tell you there is nothing more alarming than seeing the one you love slowly become enamored with cutesy scrapbooking tutorials and hand-painted picture frames.

I think Dad is expecting me to have some sort of reaction to where we’ve pulled over for lunch. It’s an Applebee’s. I cannot imagine having an opinion on Applebee’

I know people think being queer is, like, very fabulous and full of witty repartee and all that, but sometimes it’s also crying in the bathroom of an Applebee’s somewhere near Margaretville, New York, while Rihanna’s “S&M” plays on the speakers for the early-bird crowd.

We’re both gay. For most straight people, this is an infallible, determining factor of friendship, as if queer people are magnetized.

I consider throwing myself in the lake but decide to save the histrionics for when a lifeguard is on duty.

I would like to toss my statued body into the lake and stay down there until everyone watching this interaction has been dead for hundreds of years, and only then will I rise.

It escapes as a whisper, not because my sadness has made me small, but because I’m brimming with fury. These people weren’t her family. I was her family. They have no right to use her memory to bring themselves closer together. To touch me, as if my grief could be grasped by anyone else.

I leave the lip gloss on. Bright things in nature are often poisonous. Let that be my defense, then. Let Aspen watch, and predators prowl, and all the waiting jaws yawn wider. I will be a ruin to consume.

But I know better. Maybe it’s because I was raised with a sister, or maybe it’s because I’ve spent my life on the outside, peering through a yearning distance at the games girls play, memorizing every turn and trick with the desperate hope that one day I’d be invited to play along, too. So of course I know better. And of course a beast of cunning and misdirection like myself recognizes what’s happening here. Camouflage.

Ah, I think to myself. Mars has a crush. I decide no, I don’t, but thank you anyway.

I have never prayed until Caroline died, and now that she’s gone, I only have one prayer. Just one. Wherever you are, let it be bright. I hope it’s light that greets us, in the end, after everything. The alternative is unbearable.

In the woods there is a valley, in the valley there are two people, within them both a person-shaped emptiness. Wyatt and I understand each other. “I’m sorry,” I tell Wyatt. “I’m sorry, too,” Wyatt tells me.

I don’t want to move on just yet. I just want to sit here a little while longer beside her ghost, and try to hold her hand.

I don’t fear the dark. I know the dark, and it knows me. Within it, I’m safe from the sun’s lovely illusions. I know what I’ve always known: The monsters worth fearing are the ones that are dangerous enough to hide in daylight.

“Death isn’t the end,” she says. “It’s just when we become everything else.” “But I don’t want everything else, Caroline. I can’t apologize to everything else, or hug everything else. Or watch a movie. Or talk. Or see you. I don’t know who I am if I’m not your twin.”