I follow her instruction without question, heading back into the sitting area where the fireplace is already roaring. Jiraiya sits behind the computer, the seriousness of his brow lifting slightly as he nods his hello.
“‘Sup, man,” I say.
He doesn’t respond.
“Don’t mind him,” Gayle fans her hand in his direction, but her eyes are brighter than they were before. “Tell me about your film. Is there any way I can watch your documentary?”
I scratch the back of my neck, blood racing under the surface of my skin. Award-winning filmmaker, and I still get shy when someone I have an ounce of respect for asks to see my work. Sensing this, she adds that I don’t have to tell her if I don’t want to.
But I do. I want to know how it impacts her. What scenes make her have to look away from the screen, and which ones make her have to blink away tears. In fact, I want a scene-by-scene report of how my film makes her feel. Yet, I still feel nervous when I tell her. “It’s calledEpitaph,and you can watch it on Curiosity, or maybe, if your local library uses Kanopy…I’m pretty sure you can watch it for free through there.”
“Epitaph, that’s….wow. I’m excited to watch, although I’m one hundred and ten percent sure it’s going to reduce me to a puddle of tears,” she says.
I bite back a laugh.
“When I was in high school, we had to study a poem by the same name. Are you familiar?” she asks.
I’m still stunned that this isn’t a surface-level conversation. So stunned that I stand there talking with her for who knows how long. We only break away from each other when one of the employees requests her presence in the kitchen. By now, more guests are out and about, dressed for the day’s activity. I head to my room to do the same.
While I wait for the shower to heat up, I pull up the poem she mentioned before. Strangely, I hadn’t come across it in my research, but then again, I’d mostly sought after other documentaries and memoirs.
The first lines punch me right in the gut.
Pin-pricks in the backs of my eyes warn me to stop, but I have to keep going, have to keep reading this song, this love letter to grief, and it’s twisting, devastating beauty. How it forces you to condense your love for someone else, someone not here anymore, into tears, prayers, and bitter regret. Regret for never saying enough I love you’s or apologies. The worst kind of unrequited love.
What makes the poem beautiful is that the author requests none of these things upon his death, but that we take all that love with nowhere to put it and put it in each other, the ones still here instead.
I reread this one stanza over and over again. Each time, it takes the breath out of my lungs, even when there is no oxygen left to steal.
“You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.”
My hands shake while I undress, eager to get under the heat of the water. As soon as that first droplet hits my skin, the dam bursts, and I shed tears like I haven’t in years. I let them flow freely, aware that no matter how much time passes, I’ll always have moments like this where the grief feels as raw and as fresh as the day Juno slipped to the other side. Maybe if I learned this sooner, if I allowed Marie to feel the entirety of it without —no.
I didn’t know better. I didn’t know how to give her what she needed, and she didn’t know how to ask.
I repeat the mantra my therapist gave me as I wipe my face one last time, stepping out of the shower and swiping the fog off the mirror. We fell apart, but it wasn’t my fault, wasn’t hers either. I close my eyes and wait for the guilt to fade away before re-opening them again. As I stare at my reflection, my red-rimmed eyes stare back at me. The awareness of where I am and why I’m here makes me feel less like I’m falling into a black hole and more like I’m at a Christmas retreat to celebrate my son’s favorite holiday. Then, with the weight of the last half an hour lifted from my shoulders, I laugh.
Grief is funny like that.
Krystal
Ibrace myself against the chill as we climb out of the shuttle in front of Sweet Ink Tattoo. Everyone else chatters among themselves, partner to partner, couple to couple. You might have thought I wasn’t here with them, that I just happened to be standing here at the same time.
“I thought we were painting ceramics today?” I turn to Gayle.
“We are,” she smiles, tapping away at her phone before glancing up at me. “You’ll see.”
