It Never Gets Better

[Ten Years Without My Dad]

It’s July again, always July again. Suffocating and stifling. The kind of heat that kills those forgotten: little babies in cars, or homeless drunks, or people over a certain age with pre-existing health conditions too-slow getting their mail. It’s the inside of my apartment’s laundry room, more of a shed, really. A shack. It only accepts quarters, and it will stiff you of three or four beyond the required $2.75 a spin cycle. Incomprehensibly ovenlike, I see little black spots. Still, I press my profile into a quilt pulled fresh from the dryer, hotter even than the air. It’s made from all your old shirts, and the steam from the detergent paints my skin maroon all over, like a rash.

It never goes away, the grief.

Or dull or go down an octave or leave you, even for an afternoon, even for a matinee.

It simply exists where it didn’t before. “Energy can not be created or destroyed,” A fundamental principle in physics. “Oh, but they meant atoms. Physical things.” Is grief not tangible? Not the pinprick of a dirty needle? Not something dripping blood and excrement in the palms of your hands—you’re not sure how you came to hold it, exactly, the lights went off, and then you were a part of it, impossibly, indignantly, cupping a biohazard that was already seeping into the pores of your skin once they turned back on, again.

It’s not the love that I had, that’s still there—fluorescent and orange, a sucker punch. You go down laughing. This is different, has teeth, a prion disease, “We don’t know why it kills you, just that it does, oh, and you lose your fucking mind first. And there’s no cure.”

It seems silly, really, to think that there was once a time when I was not intertwined with grief. We share the same body, now, release breaths of air in amusement at the same crooked jokes.

Ten years.

It was the Ancient Egyptians (allegedly, this is debated, as everything is) that took notes of the flood cycles of the Nile and gave a starting point for our understanding of time, as we’ve come to know it. Three-hundred-ish days and some change seems cyclical, they figured, it had a nice ring to it. A Greek astronomer came along and eventually fine-tuned to 365 days and, someone along the way calculated it was actually precisely 365 and one fourth, really, if you were being technical about it. Finally, the Roman Julian calendar implemented this system and it took off, the way these things do. Such a sensical idea! 365.25 days for our planet to go around the sun once, we’ll call that a year.

And within the years of time, of course, came culture, with feelings and traditions, which turned otherwise commonplace Tuesdays into anniversaries, to mark the traditions we had big, fiery feelings about. This all crystalized, gained credibility the longer it was respected. And so it’s ten years later; it’s been ten years since you died. Crying in the fucking laundromat, boiling to death in a greenhouse because somebody six thousand years ago who spoke a completely different language and adhered by a completely different set of societal-structured rules decided we needed to measure what a day was, probably, and we needed to do it their way. Then somebody else, same thing, someone I will never meet or know about or have any interaction with other than they dictated monumental pieces of my life like how time exists throughout it, somebody then, however many years later, decided let’s start writing shit down, we’ll write dates down, and now I have to fucking look at the calendar and think “10 times this day has happened since you died.”

And it’s like shards of glass pulling my skin off the bone in the makeshift laundromat, the pain.

And no one cares once it’s been 10 years. A decade is a far enough away time that your sadness, they’d never say it to your face, but it’s just, well, it’s indulgent, really. Indulgent to the point of gluttony if they’re being honest, you are gluttonous, don’t you see? Like everything else in this overpriced capitalist Hellscape of a world, junk food and reality TV and vanity, and and they do not feel bad for you. This is not offensive, particularly, it’s not anything, it’s neutral. It’s life.

And everyone has forgotten about you, except me. Everyone, everyone.

Tania and Gab sent flowers, like they do nearly every year, and Mom sent a sun catcher that said you were in the reflection of the beams, in the light, and I called Niki on Facetime and cried until I could breathe, again, and I wrapped the quilt of your old shirts around my shoulders even though it was 94 degrees outside, and felt 104. I wore the blanket as armor and kept all of the lights off and watched documentaries and padded around the apartment, trying to keep it together and trying to make myself eat. I didn’t. I stood over books I couldn’t hold still enough to read and drank Diet Cokes because you drank them and sipped at cups of coffee, I like milk and syrup in my coffee, when you were alive I never drank it, but I do, now. I lie on the tile floor, and it is filthy with crumbs from crackers, strawberry stains, spots I’d spilt my drinks turning too fast, the little plastic piece that holds your bread tight. It feels like the kitchen is on fire and I don’t exist. I wish you knew I drank coffee.

Coraline-eyed in a lawn chair, I was, in the fetal position, numb but aware, some piano key hours after you died. I was every inch of seventeen, excommunicated out front for some plain offense, “Fuck God,” I think it was, or some similar suit, in a room of Christmas-and-Easter Catholics. “He’s with God now,” Someone had said, prefacing my taunt. But I didn’t want to talk about God.

“You don’t get to be mean like this,” someone said, lovingly, pulling on my elbow with so much momentum that it bruised later. But my dad had just died. I got to burn the whole world down if I wanted to. Didn’t I? Shouldn’t I?

So, the lawn chair. Alone.

I think about the scene, the movie stills, if I could go back, now, all logic aside, and sit next to her, my twenty-seven to her seventeen.

“God, you got fat,” She’d say, dead-dad of three hours and twenty three minutes and all, “Is this seriously what I look like in a decade?”

I’d pinch at the bridge of my nose.

“I forgot how mean you were before this happened,” I’d say back to her, this demon of a teenage girl, this child, love-starved and astute, that didn’t belong anywhere, yet. “It’s fucked up, but this makes you so much kinder, losing him.”

“I’d rather be a bitch,” She’d say.
“Me, too,” I whisper, almost instantly. Nodding. “In every lifetime.”

And then she’d start crying, because her father is dead, and I’d understand, because we don’t need to segway into some meaningful transition from our appearance to the tragedy that unfolded this morning, it’s already there, in the air, it speaks for itself, and I get it, and I won’t console her, or touch her, or do anything but take up the space next to her, .

“Does it get better?” A collage of plane-crash thoughts that would all lead her to this one.

And what could I say to her?

“No.” I’d almost smile, how sad people do when nothing’s funny, “No, it never does.”

Sobbing, now: “I want to die.”

I’m almost whispering, “You live, though.”

“I can’t, I don’t want to.” Sobbing, incoherently, rocking back and forth, red-faced, inconsolable. The only thought I had the days that followed.

Oh, but the colors you’ll see, the way your heart breaks, over and over, the people you piss off, there’s so many of them, all the time, how you learn to argue, and craft language, the children your family keeps having, the places planes take you, and your thoughts take you, the albums that haven’t come out yet, the absolute cluster-fuck of messes you’ll entangle yourself in, be glued through, then cut out of, the people who charm you in friends-of-friend’s porches and on worn leather barstools and graffitied sidewalks, the friends you make, and fall off with, the cities you lose sleep in, the dreams you fold for ones you couldn’t even pretend to conceive, now.

I say none of this.

“You guys…you talked about it, I mean, he had talked about this, when it started getting bad. He said he wouldn’t want you to stop liv-” I swallow. After all this time, it’s still like being pressed into cement, as it dries.

I look down. “You can’t let your life end because his did. It would be such a ‘fuck you,’ to him. Everything he poured into you, every idea and museum and ‘you can be anything you want in this world,’ it would all be so pointless if you just… he wouldn’t want you to, okay. He told you he wouldn’t want you to.”

But I’m not listening, blown to bits and pieces in what’s left of the lawn chair. I try not to roll my eyes at the drama of it all. Crybaby, I think, and I stand.

“C’mon, get up,” I say, reaching out my hand, and the whole reality shakes, splits down the middle, falters like a camera bleeding color splashes and lines of red.

“C’mon, get up,” It’s a whisper, back in this reality, now, where there is only one of me.

Oceans of gravity, hundreds of hearts breaking throughout my body, as I’m cheek-kissing the kitchen floor that needs to be swept, mopped. “Get up.”