Long Story Short

And then it happens, despite your best intentions to the contrary.

Or, at least that's true for me.

It was mid-September, already feeling like fall, and my plans had changed suddenly—I was going home for a funeral. Nevermind that I hadn't spoken to the deceased in more than ten years; she had been important to me at one point in my life, and I needed to be there.

There was a man, N., in the picture at the time. He had stolen into my apartment in the middle of the night. I knew he was coming, but it stirred me from my sleep all the same. Then the next day, he was leaving the city in much the same way that he had arrived in my apartment the night before—meaning that he had been making murmurings, it was nothing unexpected. Yet suddenly they sounded serious, suddenly there was a time frame.

I didn't realize that I cared until it seemed to be too late.

I tend to disassociate from my emotions, or so I've been told. But, not on the day of the funeral. Instead, I was near tears. It was a number of things, really: the lack of sleep, the difficulty of going to any funeral, the trip after to see my own grandfather's grave—how we had gotten completely lost and how shocking it seemed to be to see my own surname on the headstone when we finally arrived. I grew up in a family where children didn't go to funerals and so had never been to his grave before.

In my mind, the day exists mostly in the details: the misting rain that made the ground so damp that my heels dug into it; the smoothness of the stone I placed on my grandfather's grave to signal that I had been there; the steady sound of N.'s breathing over the phone as I talked about the difficulty of it all and his suggestion that, maybe, just maybe, sleep was what I needed; the suprise to discover that I, who doesn't cry easily, was actually crying.

And, there I was, a few months later, crying again—sobbing, actually. Things were over at that point. In fact, we were supposed to be meeting persumably to talk about that. Instead, I was talking about a family health issue. Or, trying, rather. I couldn't get any words out. Couldn't do much of anything.

And, again, most of the night is in the details: the hasty departure from the bar since, clearly, I couldn't be there or anywhere in public for that matter; the scratch of his sweater against my face as he held me; how my back started to ache from the strength of my sobs; my knowing that I would forgive all else, that I had to, because I had no energy left to be angry, left to be anything.

It's easy, in retrospect, to say that these things don't matter, that hindsight is 20/20 and all the rest of it.

But, I was there.

And, months later, I find myself trying to make sense of it all. Of why things happen in the way that they do. Or, more specifically, why this played out as it did. I don't cry; I make a sarcastic comment, brush it off, and move on. Yes, this was different—and, yes, much, much worse—than anything I've ever had to (or possibly will have to) live through. But him?

Maybe it's as simple as this: he was there.

I don't know.

I'm inclined to think that's not the case, that what's important stays so.

There's this, too: I wanted to be right about him.