(no subject)
I remember the first time after you died that I laughed. It was a Sunday, three months to the day after you left us. Muriam had taken me to the theater to distract me from the fact that it had been ninety days since I held your hand in mine. Twelve weeks since I stroked the hair off your forehead and kissed your pallid cheek. You had told me that once you got out of here, got those damn tubes out of your arm and off your nose, we'd go to the park, fly that kite that you'd brought home after a sale at CostCo. I smiled and nodded, didn't say anything because I didn't think I could speak. You didn't really mind.
The movie was spectacularly bad, horrendous acting and special effects that were anything but special. I gripped Muriam's hand and shoved my other fist into my mouth, stifling the snickers then laughs then guffaws that were bubbling their way up my throat, swirling around in my mouth, spilling from my chapped lips. It felt like a fizzy drink going down the wrong pipe, the flavor staying in my mouth for a while afterward, choking and painful. My cheeks hurt and I thought there might be bruises later; it seemed fitting.
The day after the doctor sat down and told us that it was stage four, inoperable, you only have a year if we're being exceedingly generous, really shouldn't plan past six months, you sat in our bed. I brought you a newspaper, like you had asked, carried a large cup of coffee in my other hand, scalding even through the handle. We shared it, the mug large enough to do so, and read about the atrocities in our city. I didn't know that this would become a tradition, persisting until the final weeks, when you couldn't keep even half a cup down and hospital regulations wouldn't let me in before ten. You looked at the obituaries and didn't stop for nine months. The coffee was bitter.
Telling my parents was the worst. The two minutes of thick silence before my mother sat her head down on the table and started to sob stretched like molasses, leaving sticky residue and itching away at my skin. You held my hand and didn't cry until we were in the car on our way home. You stared out the window and let the tears come falling, dripping off the bump on your imperfect nose, fall down and leave a perfect circle on your light-wash jeans. Your shoulders shook and your chest heaved but no sound escaped your mouth, leaving the car in silence except for the Death Cab for Cutie album that played in the background. Love is watching someone die. I bit my lip at the irony and tried not laugh in hysteria. That was the only time you had ever let me see you cry.
I wish you had spared me that one experience.
After you told me you didn't want to try treating it, I didn't speak to you for two days. You were leaving me, deserting me with our dog and worn in couch and the full sized bed that was all we could afford when we first moved in together, way too small for two people, but vast and insurmountably cold for just me. You stared at me and didn't say anything either, except for once, the first night, when you leaned in and whispered that you just need to let go before it gets too hard. I bit my tongue and slept on the couch. Bobo slept with you, and you left the door open all night. I listened to you sing yourself to sleep and thought my chest was collapsing in on me.
I didn't go to your funeral. You life had already been celebrated, I had celebrated it with you every damn day since I met you at a party of a mutual friend, smoke hanging in curtains and swirling in the air (It seemed like smoke was always around us, choking the life out of you and squeezing it out of me). I didn't want to mourn in front of people, I had been constantly mourning for nine months, would mourn for the rest of my life, I didn't want to do it some more in front of all the people who liked to say that they knew you, liked to pretend that they had a right to stand in a graveyard and shed tears as your body is lowered six feet under.
Instead, I went to the park and flew your kite.