All the Dangerous Things

by Stacy Willingham

They don’t want to get too uncomfortable. They don’t want to actually live through what I’ve lived through, every ugly moment. They just want a taste.

They want enough for their curiosity to be satiated—but if it gets too bitter or too salty or too real, they’ll smack their lips and leave dissatisfied.

The truth is, people love violence—from a distance, that is. Anyone who disagrees is either in denial or hiding something.

Sometimes, the mind is just stronger than our attempts to override it.

“It’s been a year,” I respond. “How can you move on in a year?”

But that’s the thing about grief: There is no manual for it. There is no checklist outlining the optimal way to move through it and move on.

necessity—not for the taste or presentation, but for survival alone—but when you throw another person into the mix, it turns into an activity, a pastime. Enjoyable, even. An intimacy in the mundane.

I used to obsess over the way his mouth would hover inches from mine when we were deep in conversation; the way he would pull back slightly, licking his lips, like he was trying to taste me in the air between us.

people in our lives into tidy little compartments, keeping them there to make ourselves feel safe, so seeing my coworkers there, like that—ripped from our emotionless cubicles and conference rooms, wiping snot on their shirtsleeves and their eyes red and raw—felt unnatural and wrong, driving home the realness of it all.

Ever since his fingers wove themselves into my hair and his lips attached to mine, I couldn’t help but wonder: If Allison hadn’t died, would this have ever happened? If she hadn’t died, would Ben have ever chosen me?

I like to think of our memories like a mirror: reflecting images back to us, something familiar, but at the same time, backward. Distorted. Not quite as they are. But it’s impossible to look our past straight in the eye, to see things with perfect clarity, so we have to rely on the memories.

“We’re not supposed to talk about that.” Because we weren’t. We never talked about anything. Even to this day, my parents prefer secrets and silence to uncomfortable conversation. They never even mentioned it to us. They never even explained what happened; never allowed us to understand or grieve.

In this light, it actually seems worse than cheating. It’s more calculated, more cunning. More manipulative.

It was like she just shrunk herself down to make more room for him.”

But aren’t all of our lives just stories we tell ourselves? Stories we try to craft so perfectly and cast out into the world? Stories that become so vivid, so real, that eventually we start to believe them, too?

In a way, I understand it. I really do. Nothing about grief makes sense: the things it has us do, the lies it leads us to believe.