1.
For the first time all evening we are alone, in the bedroom dark. "If you're gonna do it, just do it" you say. Somewhere else, a fault line ripples across a desert highway. Eerie stillness, then a rupture.
For once it is you attuned to me, barely home an hour from your trip and already you can sense it. And now, in one crisp sentence, you've offered me what is perhaps the first gift in our four years together that feels like a gift: an off-ramp. A few syllables later, we bury our relationship and go to sleep.
The next morning I meet Dad downstairs in the kitchen, car keys in hand. He will drop me off at work, then drive back to pick up Mom and Grandma and head into D.C. for a day of exploring. California tourists in a ghost town. Every year the city empties out in the days before Thanksgiving, a slow and slightly surreal exhale for those of us who stay.
I wonder whether he and Mom could sense the death from where they slept in the guest room the night before, though I suspect they know. We barely make it past the Drafthouse on Columbia Pike when it comes up. I thought I could get through the holiday. It just sort of happened. We make the turn onto Route 50 and go on talking about who knows what. The drive glows gold. We even have time to stop for breakfast burritos from Anita's—the kind we always order for special occasions at the office.
Looking back, I mostly remember the way we sailed through traffic, gridlock replaced by wings. Nothing but open road.
• • •
2.
They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice before you become an expert. Our 36,842 hours as a couple rendered me a bona fide triple crown, and then some. A virtuoso in the art of giving in, swallowing horse pills of resentment, abandoning myself when she needed me most.
Google tells me it's been 97,848 hours since that Thanksgiving dinner that felt like a funeral, where our families gathered to silently pass plates of turkey and exchange final farewells. 96,426 hours since the day my therapist gently suggested that, with you gone, she and I may no longer have much to talk about.
Was it all those hours that made me an expert in forgetting? All I know is I have expertly reduced you to a child's rendering of a ghost, poorly drawn and vaguely villain-shaped. Even in my journals, you are nameless. Only initials. I have blurred out all the shameful details, buried the box with you in it under some forgotten floorboard and looked only forward, never asking what grows and what dies in the dark.
I saw on Facebook last week that your mom died. Cancer. The top post on your sister’s page, which I still quietly visit every few months, careful not to leave footprints.
You always saw me as something soft—too soft, maybe. I wonder if you'd feel differently if you could somehow watch me now: reading the announcement where your sister tagged you, swiping through the small memorial of photos, unable to feel much of anything in your direction. Just like I’ve been practicing.
• • •
3.
I lean over the kitchen sink for a closer look at the cicada that rests on the window screen, splayed and motionless. Bringing hot coffee to my lips in slow motion behind the glass, I study the lace of its wings, like something borrowed from a garden fairy. It whispers, "you don't have to run this time.”
I remember just a few summers ago when cicadas littered the sidewalks, lay in mounds at the foot of the white oaks outside our condo. My husband was enthralled, gently luring them onto his long fingers and holding them up to the light. Meanwhile I locked myself inside, refusing to leave until the brood had burrowed back into the earth. Out of sight out of mind.
But now, in the stillness of a Monday morning as light dapples through the pines that guard the back fence, I lean forward. Crane my neck to get a good look, perhaps for the first time. Ask myself how thick the glass needs to be before I can look right at it, without flinching.
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Loved reading this in full, after hearing you share a piece of it! <3
“You don’t have to run this time”.
Wow, a visceral reaction to remembering when I too realized I no longer had to walk on eggshells , look over my shoulder, or fall all over myself trying to make things “right”.
And I would add, that that part of my life gave birth to the one I am gratefully living now 💜
Love you 🤗