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~ Black Anniversary ~ December 1, 2005 My Love died a year ago today; today is the day he did it. I keep wondering what it was like for him today, what he ate or listened to on the radio. When did he decide to do it? Did he know all day that it was his last, and mark the final times he performed the mundane tasks of his life? This is the last time I'll ever eat, or see the sun set, brush my teeth, look in the mirror... Was he afraid, or excited - or just sad and angry? The waitress who served him his last meal had known him for 20 years, and said she would never have thought there was a thing wrong with him. So he ate his spaghetti and then went home, and sometime in the bleak freezing dark when most of the world was still he went into his closet and never came out again and in doing so changed the world for more people than he ever would have dreamed, and some of us are still reeling. This very night I sat in his parking lot looking at the light over the back steps, trying to bring myself to go in, wanting to be near him but knowing enough of him to be afraid to approach. Was he still alive when I was down there? Could he hear my old engine idling in its loud, distinctive way, and did he wait there for a moment, wondering what I would do, then hear me driving away? Would I have stopped all this horror if I had insisted and let myself in or would I have found him dead already, as warm and still as Romeo? I lit a candle for him that night when I went to bed, thinking to myself that somehow its light would guide him back to me. I woke up sometime before dawn, frightened and cold, and the first thing I did was look over to see if it was still burning; it was, but barely. Somehow I felt that the candle was his connection to me and that it was important not to let it go out. I got up and poured some of the wax off of it and then went back to sleep, still trembling. I think sometimes that it was he who woke me then, following that flame through the dark just as I had hoped. Now somehow a year has gone, when most of it seemed like one long, awful day. The weeks passed whether I noticed them or not and now the crisp late-autumn air smells the same as it did from the back of his bike, and I realize how long it’s been since I saw his face. And suddenly it’s today – but it feels like then. These hours seem as terrible and urgent as if it were happening now, as if somehow there’s still a way for me to stop it. I understand more about it now than I did then, of course, but the worst questions, the ones that have seared their way into me like branding irons, remain. His absence remains as well, hanging in the air like smoke, following me through the house like a balloon in a downdraft. There are longer and longer stretches these days where I’m not stuck in the worst of it, but then all of a sudden I’ll turn a corner, and there it is – or isn’t - again. He was alive and warm next to me and now he’s not and sometimes I still can’t for the life of me figure out how that happened, how I got from there, where he was, to here, where he’s not. It’s like driving home from work and realizing when you get there that you can’t remember whole stretches of the ride, though you assume you must have been paying attention because here you are… Over the year I’ve watched him hang suspended in the instant of his death like a dark jewel, untouched by the passing of time. Life has continued, the world has moved on and still he remains exactly as he was, precisely as he desired. He simply… stopped, and then I was pulled away from him like driftwood in a stream, unable ever again to reach back and touch him, even once more. And now he’s immortal, and sometimes he paints the sky. Happy Deathday, Honey. I hope you got everything you wished for. - Beth
~ Two Years: Good Night, My Dearest Darling ~ Thursday, November 16, 2006: Two years ago tonight, just about this time, was the last time I ever saw Jeff alive. It was brutal, it was nasty, it was typical of an exchange with Jeff Kelly during his bad times, but he was in his flesh, warm and breathing and exquisite – even in his ugliness. Maybe especially then: he was so good at it. Still, I told him I loved him as I left; oh, I’m so glad that’s what I did, that I didn’t take some sort of parting shot to try to gather what I could of my dignity and my shattered heart as I walked out. He told me he loved me too, though he wouldn’t meet my eyes; he sounded terribly, terribly sad. I left him a couple of messages after that, trying to remind him that we loved each other, to reason with him somehow, and never stopped waiting every moment to hear from him until I found out three weeks later that he was dead. He still is, the stubborn bastard. There’s just no talking to him when he gets like this. So much of the next year or so was a daze; I remember bits and pieces, of course, but all jumbled up like puzzle pieces in a box. When warm weather came I couldn’t make any sense of it, because it was December, even though the calendar said it was May. It had been December for me since the day Chris and Dave came and told me he had hung himself and I fell, screaming, to the floor. I woke up around November or December of last year, I think, slowly. I just… slid back into the world, the color started to come back and I could feel my body again, knew that my feet, miles below me, were touching the ground. I felt like… a spinal cord patient when they first struggle up out of their wheelchair, I think: in terrible pain and desperately weak, but up! Up and moving. I’m not the same as I was before That; some parts are familiar, but a great deal is different. I got out of touch with one of my closest friends for more than a year after That Happened, and when we started talking again she told me it seemed like ten years had passed on my end. It feels like it was all last week to me, except that I’m a hundred years old now and nothing is left remarkable beneath the visiting moon. I think I feel him around me sometimes. Sometimes I hear a song and wonder if he hears it, too. Or maybe he’s just… gone. For two years already, God help me. Good night, my dearest, dearest darling. I still remember your beautiful hands.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, |
