Movement
The weather is like this: cooler, when you can just put on a sweater and only feel as if maybe a coat would have been better. The leaves are falling and smell of sweetness and decay. The crisp football air feels good.
But there is an argument. This homecoming game littered with high school angst is anything but. It is a saying goodbye, a fight, a tug of war between friend and lover in which friend wins. No amount of quoting Beckett and playing Kathy’s Song is going to get her back now.
And he says, “So this is it? That’s all there is?”
And neither friend nor lover hears the threat, as lover is pulled away willingly from a quarrel gone awry. They have no idea the echo those words will carry through the rest of their lives. Those words are weightless and float up into the night sky to rest like stars that look small, insignificant, untouchable.
But in the paper the next morning, the friend reads and instantly knows he is gone. As she lays the paper down to shake the idea of what she wants to believe is someone else’s shocking, violent death, there is the knocking at the door that anyone who’s heard will never forget the sound of.
And no matter that she is shaking her head and saying, “No, no,” as she opens the door. It is “Yes” and their lives all change trajectory, ever after, from the impact.
Ok, wow, amazing blog, amazing person, will now be an avid reader and sometimes commenter…thank you for sharing this part of you – i wish I could be so honest – you are very brave.
Thank you for your kind words, April. They mean a lot.
I wrote this because my dear friend Phillip has been on my mind lately. Twenty years ago today, October 28, I woke up to read in the paper that a boy had jumped from a building in our town, and I knew it was him. I would never have imagined that grief can linger so long, or emerge so suddenly from slumber.