I started keeping people in polaroids. That way, no matter the distance (emotional, physical, imagined, or real) I could still remember it all. Each detail. Each color. Each word. As if I had found a way to stop the hands of time and allow those decrepit fingers to rest. As if the world would be forced to hold its breath. As if the world had forgotten how to release the oxygen from its lungs, holding those gasps of air like secret promises between best friends.
I remember exactly where I was when I was first told the news. Snapshot of Utah, the cradle where I spent the first 15 years of my life. The only place I had ever called home was about to be tainted with the blue and black brush strokes of sorrow. I didn’t take enough pictures. I didn’t hold enough of those photos of his blonde hair, or my crooked teeth, or his freckles, or my bruised knees. Before that night, each moment of my little Utah home, the place my family and I had never fit into was adorned with orange. Gold. The brightest of yellows, and burgundy that reached through the depths of soil to bring roots into flowers. Brushstrokes of pride and love. Orange. Yellow. Gold. My home.
I remember exactly where I was when I was first told the news.
My feet, propped up on the dashboard. Black tea interior of the family car steeping into the darkness of the night outside. My unshaven legs, a scrapbook of scars and stories with them. Each part of me was hazy. The outline of my body was just slightly obscured. The darkness engulfed me in a way that changed how everything saw me. Barely visible in the rays of the single street lamp outside. It changed how I saw myself.
In reality- that night in the car- was being filtered through the unfocused lenses of youth. The car, parked and the locked, held the secret conversations I had with my best friend. On the phone, that boy I had fallen in love with was next to me. It was the one way to make our 9 hour distance seem like we were still down the street from each other. A string reaching to each tin can heart that rattled in our chests. I remember being so excited to hear his voice.
I was so excited. Was.
Then it was over. Snapshot of the anxiety building in my chest. Pulling string from inside my throat. Pulling my voice with it.
He’s the strongest person I have ever had the privilege of meeting. His voice was raspy and cracking over the phone. I sorted through each photo I had of him in my head. His voice never had this color. His voice was never dark greens. It never sounded like snapping pine needles. It wasn’t ever a weak, greying tone. Bending till it breaks. Becoming smaller and smaller till suddenly, it was just a part of the ground underneath us. His voice wasn’t ever like the grass we sat on. His voice was never green.
“There's something I need to tell you.” He whispered, low, gravely. I could feel the chunks of asphalt fall from his lips.
Oh god, no. I thought. I messed up, he moved on, found someone better. I thought I was the problem and I thought I was the only thing that could break his heart. Thoughts running laps around logic, Usain Bolt should take notes.
His asphalt voice broke through the phone’s screen.
“John killed himself. I thought you should know. That's why I called in a panic. I'm sorry.” He said.
What?
What? No.
I had seen him 5 days ago. I woke up 5 times and went to sleep 6, and that was enough time for him to be there and then leave.
Questions. Questions and tears and worry and fear and questions. What do you say when you don’t believe someone, but you believe they’re telling the truth? Under oath, I still would’ve held him for perjury, strictly because there’s no way someone would live through this pain. There’s not a way to live through this. There’s not a way to deal with this grief.
When you're told someone is gone, your emotions don’t immediately drain from your eyes, because sometimes tears can’t be scheduled. Floodgates open for sad films, or reunions, or 2 AM conversations, but grief plays by its own rules. Greif walks up to the dam, with a chisel and hammer, and makes its masterpiece. One crack. One leak. One drop.
“What?” My voice rattled. It wasn’t mine. It was all of my fears being conveyed through a tin can.
I swallowed my articulate and usually witty demeanor, and found it hard to cough it back up. I didn't have a comeback or a happy twist. I had a part of my heart sobbing and the other screaming for it to not be true.
I waited to hear a laugh from the other line. I waited to hear that it was just a joke. I was swallowing my pain, thinking it could be a lie. It could be. It had to be. Instead, silence hung like a wet coat by the door. Covered in melting snow. Dripping its remains on the carpet.
The street light grew dim and the polish on my nails seemed to chip into the black tea interior. Dripping into the night. Any problem before right now sold the real estate it took up in my head, and I had to make room for a new tenant. My dam had just started leaking, waterworks being chiseled into agony. But his? His was pouring out apologies and tears.
“I'm so sorry, this has been eating away at me, and I can't hold it back, and it hurts so much.” He gasped out. Gravel.
“I'm here for you. I'm so sorry. When did you find out?” I said. Monotone. Crack.
“Yesterday. I got called down from school.” Asphalt.
“Who else knows?” Chipped.
“No one. You and Sean.” Concrete.
“It doesn't seem real.” I whispered. Hole.
I wanted to fix Odin’s dam, but concrete cannot be sealed by duct tape. We spoke till our voices were hoarse and until our thoughts had pushed John into an old set of drawers with other childhood memories. Folding each corner of his person lovingly. His laugh, now creased. His eyes, paired and tucked together. His smile, hung alone, in the back of a closet.
When you’re hurt and don’ know it, the cut doesn’t sting. You aren't aware of it. How can it hurt, if you never acknowledge that you were weak enough to be hurting in the first place? When you don't tend that wound, you get a scar. A rough patch of pink mistakes that take the skin years to sift through. Skin that refuses to move past being wounded. Reminder of a mistake. We ended our night running our fingers over a fresh patch of rough skin. “Goodbyes”, “I love yous”, and “I'll call tomorrow's” aside, we ended our conversation. I decided to break the news to my family. They knew John, too.
I took a deep breath, and stepped, barefoot, onto the blacktop. From the car, the ground swayed under me. The world’s spin, unending and relentless, was still going. The hot red anger on my face fell in fat splashes. The world didn’t stop. The world wasn’t living on that fat, hot, red anger that I was consuming.
I swung open the vinyl gate, and faced the backdoor. On the other side of that door, stood the three people who'd have to fit my puzzle pieces together, and learn how to keep the pieces dry when I cried at the funeral. The funeral they didn’t know about yet. John just began to fill my sky like a rising sun and suddenly, it was a pitch black night. Again. I gripped the knob, and swung the door open.
There are very few times in your life you get to step out of yourself, and watch a film of your actions. The clapboard applauded my entry. I never realized I was speaking, because the words still had no consistency. Only an aftertaste.
“Odin called. John killed…”
Sour.
Bitter.
“John killed himself.”
My flood gate finally had enough pressure to burst. I erupted.
The next day at school was hell. A concoction of people who didn’t know this kid trying to come off like they lost just as much as I did. Hell’s recipe is 2 cups I'm sorry, and ⅓ tablespoon “Are you okay?”
I wasn't.
I said I was.
I'm a good actor.
Greif plays by its own rules. The handbook of 5 steps until normalcy- the 5 stages of moving on aren’t necessary. Sometimes, people cheat grief’s game. Cameron did. A friend of a friend. Technically, Cameron was Odin’s best friend. Cameron knew John, too.
He walked up to me, while I was a sobbing mess. An oversized sweatshirt and messy hair. In the cool air of the linoleum hallway, my tears froze into my cheeks. Tear stains wandering over my outward appearance- showing everyone I was in pain. I still don't know how he did it, whether intentional or not, and if he regrets what he said. I don’t know if Cameron knew that not saying anything might be better than trying to find the right words.
We sat on a wall on the second floor of our high school. Looking into a row of blue lockers, a sea of backpacks and overachievement, we took solace in company neither of us wanted. A cheesy motivational stanza above us, blessing the poor souls wandering in and out- A christening in fading letters. You can do it! Say ten Hail Marys.
“Are you okay, Nat?” He asked. Leaning toward me. Capitalising on my lack of cognition, and getting closer than I’d ever let him.
“I will be.” My voice still echoed through a tin can. Monotone. Nothing.
“Oh. You didn’t hang out with us a lot. You knew way shorter than we did.”
“Did you even know John? Do you have like, a right to be sad?”
You sat at my table and played board games with him. We sat on my couch and talked about life, I followed him to his friends where he explain cars to me, and he tried to get me to swear for the first time. He followed me and my boyfriend and took pictures of us holding hands when he thought we couldn't see. He played my favourite video game, we beat a boss, we laughed, and cried, and lived.
“Yeah. I knew him.”
Cameron’s words still haunt me. A ghost that can’t be exorcised in confessional, one that lives in the upper rafters of my lungs. When I breathe in, I feel his voice in the cathedral of my mind. Do I have a right to be sad? I sure hope so. I pray to whatever lies above the clouds that I do. I can continue on about this boy for years, days, nights, and forever. I hope I have a right to be sad.
The service was at 10:00 AM on the following Saturday. A brisk, beautiful, astounding morning. When an artist dies, some people believe that they are given the gift of using the air around them as their last canvas. The skyline was golden. The trees turned the ground into a kaleidoscope of greens and let the blue of the sky peek its head through in just the right ways to make a tapestry of colors. John loved art. I think that if there is a God, he let John paint the sky that morning.
Many people don't plan out what to wear to funerals till they're going to one, myself included. I didn't want to adorn my body in black. Black wasn't right. John wasn't dark and brooding, or depressing. He was-
He is the epitome of joy. He'd smile and it would seem like the planet took a second to acknowledge its beauty, sighed contently, and moved on with a little bit of a bounce in the way it turned. John was yellow. Pure, unabashed, untapped gold.
That morning I pulled out my blue dress. Blue and yellow compliment each other very well. I wore it for a second reason, too.
It was covered in birds. White song birds. John is free, and his song will echo on, though many people. John is a bird.
I could go on about the dreary mess of the funeral home, and the tears, but no. Funerals are for the living, which is what I learned by living through one. The tears healed the wounds that were still open and I left the funeral home with my 3 best and closest friends, in happy tears. We hugged one time though the service, and in that moment, I felt the chains of our lives become welded together. I can't get rid of those boys, and I never want to.
The sky continued to change. The stars came, and died. The leaves turned and became what they expected of themselves. The waves continued to roll, and crash. Nothing stayed the same. People come into my life now and don’t know- and will never know John. They won’t know this golden boy. The best I can do is show them who they could’ve known. I can write. I can tell people. I can show them what I had the honor and privilege to know- I knew John.
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