06/08/08

On this day ten years ago my old life became something unrecognizable, something I still am unsure how to process. My mom has been dead for a decade, and really it feels longer, because the person who watched it happen doesn’t feel at all like me. Recently I’ve tried to remember what June 8, 2008 felt like, but mostly it felt like nothing, like the universe had all of a sudden revealed itself to be totally empty. I remember walking out of her bedroom, climbing out of the window of my childhood bedroom, and smoking a cigarette. And later, when the men arrived—what men? who called them?—to pick up her body, I was the only one who saw them zip it into a bag. When they saw me in the doorway watching, I felt the moment demanded some sort of gesture, and I watched my body, completely separate from my consciousness, blow a kiss towards my mother’s body as it was taken away. What was that? I would never do that, I thought later; a similar feeling stopped me from throwing the letter I had written, an apology for being such a waste of a person she believed in, into the ground along with her casket. This is not a thing, I told myself, and my numbness was overtaken by an all-encompassing shame—shame that I’d even for a second considered a fucking letter would change anything, that I hadn’t had the guts to say those words to her face because I couldn’t bear the finality of it all. Shame at what a coward I was.

The sense of loss extended outward from my mother and settled like ash over everything I saw; having abandoned the idea that anything would ever make sense again, I gave myself over to nothing. I barely remember anything from the months that followed. I failed out of school; I moved out of the house with the beach volleyball court in the backyard, the sounds of my former best friends’ normalcy having inspired, from behind my bedroom door, a transformative hatred. I drove drunk between Chicago and South Bend as a hobby, smiling fakely at the highway patrolman who’d pulled me over for speeding, noncommittally praying he wouldn’t notice the mini Sutter Home wine bottles littering the backseat. Sometimes I wondered what was wrong with me, why I didn’t cry more, but even crying felt like sort of a farce, a performance for an audience of no one that actually mattered.

Part of me wishes that ten years would have lent some insight on What It All Means, but she didn’t raise me to be a bullshitter; she hated that “everything happens for a reason” shit more than anybody. She was a writer, too; as a kid, she’d make my sister and I spend our summer vacation writing short stories based off prompts she’d source from Tribune headlines, an activity I secretly enjoyed. It wasn’t until years after she died that I even once considered that I could write, too, that possibly I could even be good at it. It is the one thing about myself I am certain she would have been proud of, a reason to try even if none of it really means anything.

I wish I could tell her I live on the beach now. She’d get a kick out of that.