“There’s no chance of this ever going away,” I overheard someone tell me in March 1997. I know they meant well, but it wasn’t going to change the fresh dirt, the death certificate, the breaking of a once full heart.
Kids treated me different after I came back to school. They still played with me, but it was with careful tiptoes. Quiet, don’t say anything to the half-orphan. He’ll start crying again. He’s getting out of all the Mother’s Day assignments, why does he have to get out of doing anything? It helped to create little words to block most of it out.
I think it’s why I write. I sucked at sports, anyway.
You try to tell your friends to appreciate what they have. Try to knock it in their thick dumbass skulls. They act like they know, but they don’t. It’s not worth saying it twice.
The death leaves a brilliant, tremendous void and you catch anything at all to hang up on your walls - anything to create a wall. You’re a fan of fortresses and you can’t stand the sight of paramedics’ lights, especially when they come at night. They started to pull her off the couch, you saw the sweat on her face, and the next thing you know, you’re grown up, not being able to see her there in the crowd during your big moments. She’s there but not, and you are too numb to even condemn anything. You can’t even tell yourself that it’s okay. Because it’s not meant to be.
She collected animal figurines, tiny pewter things. Your favorite is the blue elephant. You carry it with you in your messenger bag, sometimes even your pocket. You show it to no one because it hurts to explain, hurts like hell to hold it and say that it’s love.
Stars aren’t as bright and food tastes like shit. Your father, gone years later, writes you out of his obituary, really makes you an orphan this time. No phone calls are made and no condolences sent from Dad’s family in Virginia and Ohio. They think that you’re a piece of shit, and you think the same thing back because they definitely are.. Chances are you’ll never cross paths again. And that’s totally okay, one hundred percent fine.
Here’s the thing, what it comes down to: it happened. That’s it. You get by how you get by. You take the pieces of her that worked and you use them for your own. You become what you want, still, even when you hear her laugh in the hollow. Sunsets look different now, as does the headstone that bears her name. The whiskey tastes sweeter and the pictures of her just make you sadder, knowing she was smiling and having no clue she would be gone when she was only forty one. But maybe she left here to make you stronger. Maybe her love for you was just too strong for the thin world to hold. She left loving you so much, and could no longer, only to make you finally love yourself. That’s what you need to remember. That’s why you’re meant to live - because she knew she couldn’t.
Kevin Richard White's fiction appears in such places as Grub Street, Hypertext, The Hunger, Barren Magazine, The Molotov Cocktail, Door Is A Jar, Crack The Spine, Lunch Ticket and Ghost Parachute among others. He reads fiction and nonfiction for Quarterly West, Vestal Review and The Common. He lives in Pennsylvania.