A friend asked me to write something the other day. (Sidebar: How sad is it that I considered it exciting, as if I had homework. I’ve gotta get myself back to school. I miss it too much.) Without explaining the purpose, reasoning or request further, this is what I came up with:
We walked away from the funeral home with cigarettes in hand. I’m two months away from delivering my daughter but I don’t have the shame to hide my smoke even though my belly is towering. Halfway through the cemetary, I peel the pantyhose from my sticky thighs – the humidity of this heat wave is cooking me from uterus out.
I’ve just read his eulogy to 25 people – a speech almost entirely devoid of my real feelings. They cried at the beauty of it, I choked in the last paragraph because the lies are enough to make me cry. I don’t respect him for everything he’s taught me, I deplore the knowledge he gave me and his teaching method. I don’t think he’s at peace and a part of me hopes that there is a heaven and hell. That a line up to bliss is far from what he’s experiencing.
I know it’s lacking compassion and that the past year of cancer eating him alive, the opiodes necessary for every day breathing, even, should have karmatically wiped the slate clean. But instead, I still hear his voice, "Why do you have to be such a little asshole?" in my five year old ears, the pinch of him gripping me by the throat. I’ve said goodbye to the good in him, but I can’t walk away from the mortar he’s helped install or the memories of why it became necessary to feel nothing and strike out, first.
That night, my boyfriend tells me he loves me for the first time in a year – that my father would be proud of me. I feel nothing, still. I’ve flipped the switch off. And I know it isn’t true. The last week of funeral arrangements, the entire week before that while I was waiting for him to die – it all took away from our form of uninvolved intimacy; so, I don’t think of my father and decide to catch up on the sex we’ve missed out on.
I’ve mulled over these paragraphs for the past few days. Why they poured out of me, what the actual thesis of the narration is (is it about my father dying, that I have no class, that I don’t give a shit, that I fuck instead of feeling? WHAT?!), what the hell I was trying to say.
And then this morning it hit me as he opened his eyes beside me after I touched his shoulder, a signal of Isobel’s wake-up call – I stopped feeling everything. The point was I stopped feeling everything. Love, sex, real-deep-in-the-guts guilt, sadness, mourning. All of it disappeared, to be left with a poorly acted persona – an hologram of the girl I am, but rough, stiff and shallow.
I woke up a month ago and I started feeling again. It wasn’t about anger. It wasn’t about getting a break in life and therefore confusing a sense of weight lifting from my shoulders with happiness. My eyes opened and I wanted to shut them immediately, knowing that I had pushed him away. How cold, calculating and castrating I’d been. How I expected him to disappoint, so I never trusted or had faith, or even saw much signs of him trusting or having faith. How I closed my eyes, arms, heart – everything but my legs, really, to him.
I opened my eyes that morning, alone and feeling heartbroken. As if we’d just split up and it hadn’t been me shoving him out the door, demanding keys and money and cursing him. Like, I had been dumped by the man I was in love with. Like a wound that had just been received.
It was over, before it’d actually really started, because I had never really started.
This morning, I woke up and I watched him sleep for a few seconds. And I smiled and thought what if. But before I could finish the question, the heart-crushing panic of not knowing the answer swooped in and I had to remove myself from the moment.
I’ve gotta stop doing that.
