I woke up this morning confused. For one, I actually slept.
For two, I wasn’t in my own bed.
I was in a plush, king size bed in Lubbock, TX. I had the distinct feeling I shouldn’t be here, but I needed to be.
Everything about this morning feels wrong. I’m in the wrong city, for the wrong reason. People say normal things in the wrong way. One of those mornings where I feel like the world is slightly out of phase, and I’m seeing the bleeding between realities.
My flights were alright. I didn’t feel like I was really on them. Walking through Sea Tac airport I felt disembodied and heavy, but my movements said otherwise. I glided through TSA, to my gate and on my plane, barely feeling the weight of my actions.
I got to Lubbock at 10:30 pm. I had let him know I was going to be there at 10:30. It was not a planned trip. When I stepped out onto the crisp, warm night, for a moment I thought he might be there waiting for me, like he always was. He wasn’t. I didn’t even have the energy to be more than a little disappointed.
I got to the hotel I booked blocks from his house in a cab that took me 45 minutes to get a hold off. It was overbooked. They cancelled my erroneous reservation, and I began walking the mile long midnight walk through the middle of the city.
I’ve walked this stretch before. Hand in hand with him with a bag of candy from cvs, laughing and kissing in the warm Texas sun, the ground baking both of our feet.
I called Luis. I had told him what had happened in Sea Tac and promised I’d call him when I got where I was going. I ranted about the flight, the night, the almost movie like tragedy that was everything was like at the moment. We spoke more of why I was here when I finally got to my room. I always find Lu oddly comforting. He was never the guy I told emotional things too, most of our friendship we have just tried to posture and look cool to each other. But when I do, he is almost overtly sweet about things. I finally got off the phone close to 2am. My body was fatigued, but my head was wide awake. I was starving but couldn’t bear the thought of eating, and barely had in the last 2 days.
As I lay in the plush king size bed, I heard your voice. At first I thought I was just so obsessed with the events of the last two days I was hearing what I had immersed myself in. But the voice grew louder, and the chords more distinct, like someone was having their own little vigil for you in the next room, loud enough for me to hear by quiet enough for it to feel like a dream.
I rose and slowly walked to my door and out to the hallway, and crept over to room 301. I pressed my ear against to the door, but the music had stopped.
I leaned against the wall in the middle of the hallway and pulled the hair on the sides of my head. I am seeing you, hearing you everywhere. Even when I close my eyes.
And now, on this out of phase morning, I sit here with a plate of food I dont want in a cafe that is too bright. The latte was free, because I had to wait a little for it, I tell myself its because the whole world can see my grief.
I have a meeting with him later, that he asked for in the wee hours of the morning. He didn’t pick me up, but at least he’s picked up on the gravity of the situation. This is not the first hail mary trip I have taken on a wing and a prayer. In fact, our relationship began on one. Only fitting it would potentially end on one.
I am simultaneously so numb that I feel like an alien in my own body, controlling my limbs to perform tasks I have no connection to. There is a palpable sense of unreality, that this is some horrible mirror universe in which I find myself temporarily, and in the real one I am happy, and he loves me, and that you are alive.
I also feel unimaginable sorrow, a deep and otherworldly pain that I am only without in the few moments before I am fully conscious, when it hits deep in my chest and follows my nervous system to every extremity of my body. I feel naked; like the whole world can see, can feel the grief radiating from my body and that is my role now, a dark cloud of misery made corporeal.
I didn’t know it at the time when I booked these tickets, but death would follow me like a spectre, across lakes and plains and mountains to this town, to him. I have the sense that my mission is different today than it was on Thursday. Thursday I wanted answers, I wanted to dispel his misconceptions, hold him close like I used to, feel the spark of his presence so electric and constant that I tune to his frequency and match. Now I feel like I am on the precipice of a deep canyon, and the only thing I want is the answers. If I can get those, if I get the real ones, it will be more answers than I ever will get from you, in your final moments – pain, suffering…peace? At least sometime, somewhere I will have answers, maybe peace as well.
I didn’t know then what I know now, that I will be grieving two deaths, one after the other. But if I’ve learned anything from the experience of losing you, that moment of howling like a wolf at the void neither uncaring nor fair at the news of your departure, is that terribly, ruthlessly, wonderfully…I am still here. And I always will be.
