Minutes after I found out that he’d been killed in a motorcycle accident, I opened the app we used to video chat on, Marco Polo, and sent him a message. That’s the screenshot of me just after I found out about his death in the upper lefthand corner. It is a face of disbelief and shock, of unbelievable pain. It’s a pain I never knew existed. I remember feeling like I would rather have all my limbs severed than my heart blown open this way. I remember just being in pure awe at how deep the pain went. It wasn’t just psychological, it was physical.
I picked up the phone and I recorded a message for him that will never be opened.
My eyes are already puffy from the crying, it was not an hour later. I wanted to tell him everything now, everything I could, I wanted to tell him how much I loved him, more than I realized before, so much more, and I couldn’t. I wanted to tell him I was sorry for everything I didn’t do right, or all of my second-guessing about what we were doing, or just about the dumb text message I had sent that weekend, accidentally, chiding him for not saying that he missed me explicitly when he was showing me over and over and over that he did; by parking his new motorcycle at the house across the street from my apartment, to show me how he wished I was home, and how easy it was going to be to find parking; how he would send texts to me the morning he woke up on the last day of his life, wishing me a good morning and a great day. I was too wracked by insecurity and distance to see those things clearly.
Each time I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, I was shocked anew by what I saw. I did not recognize this person. My face seemed to be carved into a permanent state of sadness. The light was out of my eyes, my smile erased, a new crease forming in my forehead from my eyebrows being knitted together from being in anguish 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I looked like this even when I was not crying and that’s what scared me the most, that I was aging rapidly, that I would forever have a haunted face of someone who has lost someone and misses them in such a profound way that I would never look like myself again, or be myself again.
I won’t be that person again, of course.
I took them over the course of the last year, to see how I changed, to see if I changed, if there was a noticeable difference. In the beginning, I could not bother with doing my hair or makeup. As the months went on, I found some energy to be vain: to do my hair, a long, annoying task, as it is curly and I like it straight; to apply some makeup, to feel a little more human, even if I feel more like a shell.
What does healing look like? Is it being able to find joy in months-old chihuahua puppies? (All puppies, apparently are the only things that made me smile even a semblance of a real smile). Is healing just looking slightly less miserable in public while in private you are a hysterical mess? Is it just knowing that you’ve graduated from being able to make scrambled eggs and pushing the button on the microwave to being able to boil water and noodles and cook spaghetti sauce out of a can? Is it healing if you only cry for a few hours in the morning rather than the entire morning?
Is it healing when, almost a year later you are out at a club, dancing? It is the same one you took him too about six months into the relationship, and he was out of place, a deer in headlights, but thrilled nonetheless, amused at the experience, and you got to enjoy a night out in your world with him. Is it healing when you dance and you stop midway, because you remember again, that moment, you and him crushed in the back of the DJ booth, and your friend who is with you now, who has known you for 25 years, sees the look cross your face and gives you a hug, because she knows where you’ve just gone?
It is healing, but I am not yet healed. I look at all the selfies I take. The light isn’t back, not yet. But my eyes aren’t turned all the way down in a cartoonish farce of sadness. they are entering neutral territory. I can forget about the loss for a whole five minutes before I remember again that I’ve forgotten, and I think about it. Still, there are days when I just lose the entire day to grieving his memory.
Sometimes I get angry with him for taking up so much of my mind. I think of him now as much as I did when he was alive. He is as present as he was then. I think about him in the morning, when I see something on my walk, when I go shopping, when I am somewhere beautiful and I want him to be there, sharing it with me. I think about him when I fall asleep on his side of the bed, turned in the opposite way because I have a shoulder impingement and can no longer sleep the way I used to, with him curled up close behind me, my good ear down in the pillow to drown out his snoring. I think about him when I am doing the dishes, when I grab the mucky food out of the drain and remember how squeamish he used to be about that feeling, the slippery organic matter on his hands. I think about his hands, how he would have the cleanest, neatest hands of any man I met, even though he worked as a machinist.
Is this what people mean when they say people live on, that they never really die? There are questions I want to ask him and I can’t. The unresolved arguments will remain unresolved. We were on the precipice, rounding the bend to the eight-month point; we might have broken up in a month, in a year, or never at all. The lack of an ending is the hardest part, the part that puts me back to where I started. Acceptance is elusive.
So I move as well as I can in the world that doesn’t contain him anymore except in a grave somewhere in Illinois, in the hearts of his friends, his family, his coworkers. I move through the pain and hope that my eyes will be like he saw them again one day, so bright and so happy.