04/22/23

It’s interesting, the way the dead show up on TV. Like they never stopped living. Sitting in front of us, 3-Dimensional, their words clear as day. These ghosts, they don’t even flicker. They stay there for minutes at a time in the fictional worlds that dance their way across my screen.

When I think of you, it is not of your solid form next to mine. I lost access to that 10 months and 22 days ago. It’s a feeling. A warmth I seldom allow to wash over me, scared of what comes next. The part where I remember that this feeling is temporary. It can’t last for hours like the ones I used to laze away in your presence.

Those hours were easy, these seconds are fraught. The feeling has to be fought for, the feeling of you, and when it’s gone, I am simultaneously crushed and grateful I got to feel you at all.

I used to think fiction was as real as life itself, and part of me still does. The fiction I occasionally create is one of the places I can visit you, after all.

But this depiction of the dead, the one that dominates the cinematic universe, it’s not quite right.

Death is your voice echoing somewhere in my brain. Sometimes it’s forced, me trying to imagine what you would say, putting words into your mouth that don’t quite fit. But when it’s natural, it’s the most exquisite thing in the world.

Sometimes I can see the shadow of you. it’s like you’re standing an inch behind me, just out of sight. The whisper of my beautiful mother. Forever my mother. The only mother I could ever want. The one I should never have lost, which is why I refuse to. Why I talk about you incessantly, because a world where are you not part of the present moment is a world that is conspiring to kill me. So I make sure to keep us both here. It takes no effort on my part – how could I tire of talking about you?

Almost 11 months and I still don’t believe you’re dead. Denial, they call it. One of the five stages of grief. Five seems awfully convenient, as does the concept of ‘stages’. As though they ever end.

I’m not sure I will truly ever believe it, and I’ve made peace with that. Believing it would mean understanding it, and how can I do that without losing my all too tenuous sanity?

Healthy one day, dead the next. There is no understanding that. 

I’m scared a day will come where I won’t be able to hear the particular way you strung words together. The idioms that were wonderfully, uniquely you. I don’t want to forget what your voice sounds like as it answers a conversation I’m having in my head that feels real because it is.

My smile reminds people of you now. It’s not because we look alike, how desperately I wish we did. It’s because when I smile, I am thinking of you.

How powerful memory is. What sweet visions it can conjure.