And then I set my phone down.And picked it back up to add one more line:
I love you.
Diego replied with a gif of Han Solo saying, "I know."Then:
You know they make wedding rings that say that?I love you.I know.We should get those.
Are we getting married?
No that’s heteronormative bullshit but we should definitely get nerdy Star Wars rings because that’s subversive and gay and punk as fuck.
Even if Disney owns it.Shut up.
I chuckled, gave it a heart reaction, and went back to my notebook.
Dear Dad,
I’m in love.I don’t know if I’ve been in love since I was seventeen, or if that was just teenage obsession, and now I have him back, I’m looking back through rose colored glasses.I never forgot what you said that night you saw him leaving the house after midnight.
That’s not the best family.
But that’s not what I mean.Mom would’ve said that too.As a kid, it went right over my head, for the most part.I didn’t know about economic class and the push to turn our world into a capitalist juggernaut that uses the poor and undereducated for fuel.
Okay, now I was just getting high and mighty, and I hadn’t even gotten to the homophobia part.Fuck my life; what was I even doing?Was it even possible to distill the shit that had been going through my brain nonstop for the past few months into a few concise sentences?Maya Angelou or Robert Frost or some other fucking poet could do it, maybe.
But trying to do it myself felt like trying to unpick a mass of string that was tangled and tied and frayed and dusty—the sensation was dull and the work was even worse.The biggest thing I’d learned, in these last few months with Diego, was that facing the past and learning from it was a healing thing.Even if it didn’t feel like it in the moment, it was so worthwhile.So worth doing the fucking work.
Dear Dad,
I hate that I flinch from words you taught me.I hate that if we shared a locker room as teammates, you would’ve been the one talking shit on the boy I had a crush on.I hate that youdidtalk shit on the boy I had a crush on.I hate that if you’d known about my crush, you would’ve made me feel wrong, or bad, or disappointing, even if you tried not to.I hate that even though you loved me so much, you hated something about me.You just didn’t know it yet.
But I’m a grown ass man now.And even if you were still here, and I was bringing Diego to dinner with you instead of to your grave, I don’t think you’d ever apologize.Just like Diego’s dad never apologized.So is it cowardly not to bring it up now, with your ghost?Is it cowardly to let it go, walk away, like I do with everything else?
Or is it the only real choice I have here?
***
We picked Mom up from church, and Diego held the passenger side door for her, then got into the back seat without a word.
“Thank you,” she told him, and then smiled at me.“You ready?”
I nodded, because I wasn’t, but I never would be.
The sun was out, so the pretty silver streaks in Mom’s hair caught the light as we walked through the cemetery gates.Mom had a basket of big summer flowers in her arms, and Diego and I followed, him with a rose he’d brought from home, me with a wad of paper in my pocket that I couldn’t stop squeezing restlessly.
We stopped behind the familiar marble stone, and I said, “That’s it.”
“Damn, it’s huge.”Diego stepped carefully between some other Kovacs graves to eye the front of it.He frowned.“Why is it…?”
“It’s for me,” Mom said with a little laugh.
He looked at her, eyes wide, appalled.
“I know, I know.I just thought I’d save Taran the trouble someday.”
“Truly morbid,” I commented, just as I had when she’d commissioned the thing in the first place.
“Holy…” Diego let that trail off, though, as I came up beside him.Under his breath, he asked me, “Is he actually down there?”
