Consequences #17 — Amy

I don’t think they’ll ever go.

Memor­ies like the solitude of night; their tissue-thin images pro­ject bet­ter onto the black of night than the glare of day.

For the first two months after you died, I saw you in Plath-esque fre­quency; odd, given that dur­ing your nat­ural life I was never able to fig­ure out where, exactly, you wanted to fit in my life. If you even wanted to fit in it at all, that is.

Your death made you the uni­ver­sal puzzle piece — wherever I looked, you fit.

In day­light, I would rest. Past the every­day hor­rors of funeral, loss, thank-you cards and high-maintenance hot­house flowers, it was some­how easy. Grief was the best damned novo­caine ever inven­ted. I could sit in a chair for hours, mum­bling softly to myself that you were gone, prod­ding it like a newly-chipped tooth, over and over, and not a single nerve would respond.

The anaes­thesia wore off at sun­set. “Wore off” wasn’t exactly the best way to describe it, more like “hopped a cheap flight to Brazil with the blonde and all the stolen money.” The sun would fall from the sky and some­where in the house I’d double over, so angry that another day had gone by without you that I would sob help­lessly into the nearest dishtowel.

After two months, Madame Sylvia decided I was dully pre­dict­able in my grief, and moved out to find someone more enter­tain­ing to live with. I came home one day to find her gone, leav­ing a dirty house in her wake. Grief had made me both numb and blind.

I stopped see­ing you in grocery-store shelves, and redis­covered the amaz­ing occu­pa­tion of actu­ally sleep­ing at night. My friends spon­tan­eously began to remem­ber my phone num­ber, and even called it occa­sion­ally. Every morn­ing, when I brushed my teeth, I could see the slow pro­gres­sion of heal­ing. Piece by piece, my body — my limbs, my eyes, my smile — turned from glass to flesh. Every morn­ing I would flex the newly-regained part of my body and remem­ber what it was like to be whole.

I don’t think they’ll ever go, these memor­ies; not entirely. I can no more give up your memory than I can walk through life with my eyes turned back­ward to the past. But I will not stumble through life. I will not be glass.

But …

I still find myself hop­ing it will be your voice I hear on the other end of the phone.