Today would have been our two-year anniversary. That pre-supposes that we would have stayed together, which frankly, was unlikely. We were so different and the differences were beginning to chafe. The summer that he died would have been a make-or-break moment, one that unfortunately, will never get to play out.
But in my alternate timeline, we’d stayed together, we’d worked it out. It’s nearly 18 months since he left, and it feels so distant, so unreal that it’s hard to understand if it ever happened in the first place, if he was a real person that I had met and loved.
Did I ever really go on that date? Did I swipe on Tinder and exchange a series of charming messages with this person? Did we meet? Did we have a great, but a little weird, first date? Did he really come over every single weekend for almost eight months? Did I really text him all day long while he was at work? Did I stand on his back, feeling his flesh under my foot, trying to give him a massage? Was he really ever here? What is real?
When it first happened, time felt like it never moved. It had been June forever. He was frozen there, so happy with his new motorcycle, so young, 35 and optimistic, getting a farmer’s tan, showing off his new underwear, petting his dog in the sunshine.
First, the video messages that I had sent to him were always yesterday, last week, last month. I had just talked to him, I had just seen him, he was still here. His physical absence seemed impossible, I could still touch and smell him in my mind’s eye. So much of my early grief was trying reconcile the old reality with the new one that this physical space we inhabit had been dramatically altered. I would go through the motions: Now, I sit on the couch where he would have been. Now, I sit at the table next to his chair. Now, I go to bed and turn on my side so he can spoon me.
But there is no one there. I could touch those memories, but I couldn’t hold on to them. Then, as the shock wore off, he started to drift, and the photos and the videos became the memories, the memories themselves became harder to touch. Now, the photos and videos feel like someone else’s experience, a TV show of a former life of mine. What is real?
I’ve been traveling for a few months working on The Book, and on the plane here, I listened to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I had started reading the book just after Skyler died, but grief brain means reading anything but a Tweet is too difficult, and so for months I would stare at the page for an hour trying to decipher what are pretty heady and somewhat complex concepts. I got nowhere and switched to the audio book, listening to it slowly while I was on a sailing trip, on walks, whenever I needed to take myself out of my own head. It was still hard, but I finally finished it.
The postscript of the book talks about the sudden death of Robert M. Pirsig’s son, Chris, who was murdered in San Francisco. By the time you get to this part, you know Chris well, and the book is so much about the father’s attempt to connect with his young son, that his murder is devastating. After all that time and energy and love, it is just wiped away clean, as if none of it ever happened.
I was on the plane, the sun streaming through the window far above the earth, clouds drifting by. I listened to the narration as I headed back to New York City where I had been when I had learned about Skyler’s death.
“Where he go?” asked Pirsig, who was struggling with the same ideas I was. “Where did Chris go?”
He had bought an airplane ticket that morning. He had a bank account, drawers full of clothes and shelves full of books. He was a real live person occupying time and space on this planet. And now suddenly, where was he gone to? Did he go up the stack at the crematorium, was in a little box of bones they handed back? Was he strumming a harp of gold in some overhead cloud? None of these answers made any sense. It had to be asked, what was it I was so attached to?
Is it just something in the imagination?
When you have done time in a mental hospital, that is never a trivial question. If he wasn't just imaginary, then where did he go? Do real things just disappear like that? If they do, then the conservation laws of physics are in trouble. But if we stay with the laws of physics, then the Chris that disappeared was unreal.”
After Skyler died, we went to his house to clean his room. There was his stuff, his clothes he’d just acquired when we were dating, the Apple Watch, the collection of expensive colognes he’d bought at the urging of his cousin, the books I had given him to read, but went unread, the piles of sneakers and shoes. And now it was just junk; it only had any meaning to the person who was living. Without his presence, everything he owned was inert. He had given those things meaning.
Where did he go?
It was a vanishing.
People have tried to impress that he is not really gone, that he is still here. Somewhere, his energy is all around us; energy can’t be destroyed, after all. On the plane, I began to cry, the first hard cry in a few months. Crying stopped being a daily and hourly thing after the one-year anniversary. I am not sure why, but it was like something clicked inside my brain. Maybe my brain was just trying to protect me, to put my grief inside a deeply embedded box, bury it in the recesses of my psyche.
But every now and then, as it has happened occasionally since he died, I will drift to sleep and be pierced by the realization that this thing happened, that it was real, that he was real, that my love for him was real, and that he is gone. And as the dark foreboding fills my soul, I know that I will be gone, and my friends, my family, will be gone, too. And I don’t know where we all go. But I know that we are all real and my love for them is real, too.