“Me With You,” my CNF love letter to Harmony, to finding the right one and getting to be yourself with them just went live in the incomparable JMWW. Huge thanks to Hannah Grieco for giving this a home. I’m so happy to see this one go live. š You can read the piece here!
I wanted to see trees the way that you saw them, not just color and movement, classification and function. I wanted to taste the sun in strawberry, see myself in others and have something like a life before my death. I didn’t manage that, but I have managed to draft this here, now, which will just have to be my consolation. I am collecting all the pieces of me from when I was alive, trying to find the leaves that serve the tree.
I saw you at my funeral. I wanted to say something, but:
1. I couldn’t,
and:
2. What would I say if I could?
Everyone’s words arrived like a fugue, their contrapuntal compositions echoing, and none of them could hear the melodies they were making. I saw something in your eyes then that I’d never seen while alive.
This is not much different than when I was here. There’s not a distinct boundary or separation. It’s a gradual process, and you don’t always know when that process has begun. I was in the process of dying for a long time before they put me in the ground, and it’s still not over yet.
I realize now that I had glimpses of it. Moments waiting in line at the grocery store, realizing that these signs advertising products will be replaced, then will be gone. These people will one day be gone, and the store will be as well. Time will sweep its dust under the rug of the world, and there will be nothing at all to see anywhere. There will be not even the concept of nothing. It’s like that, being dead is. It’s a strong dissociation, but it’s not a severance. At least mine isn’t. It’s seeing yourself see yourself, till it feels like you’re looking into a mirror that’s facing another mirror, reflecting ad infinitum. And I’m pretty much tired all the time.
I realized as I was dying that I didn’t want to die, but it had reached an irreversible point in the process, so I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to soon be dead. It just became a fact.
And then I went away, and my body was a collection of buzzing, brilliant things, separated by color and shape and size and weight, so it was like I was seeing all my composite parts. And there was my idea of you, alone in an unlit room in what used to be my mind. I never saw the fine details, you used to tell me. I’d never miss the forest for the trees, but then I’d never really see the trees at all.
Think of anything you’ve ever seen, and then forget it. Forget that you’ve forgotten. Anything Anthropocene is gone. Anything natural is gone. There’s something there, but it’s more like a vague feeling than an actual presence. There’s not really color. I don’t want to talk about it too much.
If I focus, I can almost see a world outside of myself, outside of what I did. I can almost breathe again.
I dream memories. When I dream, I’m back in the world of matter and color and wind on arms and light in bleary morning eyes. It’s nothing pivotal. It’s the small moments, the ones we shared. It’s waiting in line at the grocery store and eyeing tabloids, dollar chocolate bars, gum, the hum of the conveyor belt and the mechanical hey-how-are-you when it gets to our place in line. It’s crunching through fall leaves, adjusting steps to coincide, and the warmth of the sun past the chill, past the gray, past it all, and feeling that there only is just this moment. Only ever will be.
My heart is happy right now. To be able to see my little bi love story go live in such a wonderful journal, among so many talented writers, this is a true honor. Thanks so much for seeing something in this one, L Scully. Here’s one for all my fellow bi peeps!
Sitting in the back of the bus with a dollar store notebook on my lap, sketching and thinking about the past. October droplets stain my public transit window, turning the grime to a vertical stream as it passes and changes the passing headlights into alien stars–nothing more than ways to mark my way as I move along.
The headlights become fireflies in fading light, the summer retreating to its chrysalis, nights getting colder and rain and wind starting to claim the treehouse we made out in the woods, not in the trees but among them, sitting on the ground and made out of repurposed wooden fences, branches, and a blue tarp we liberated from a neighborās backyard. More branches plotted out the yard around the house, where weād plant our garden once we had enough money for seeds. We never had enough money.
Playing backlit portable games underneath the blue tarp sky we made, taking our first sips of alcohol–vodka stolen from parental bottles and transferred to empty Coke cans, filling the bottles back up with water to disguise our theft. We were good.
You painted the tarp ceiling like it was the Sistine Chapel, counting sixteen candles and watching as you made a Frankenstein God touch the finger of a Super Mario Adam. You learned quickly that a little paint went a long way when some of it dripped off of the tarp and into your hair. It speckled it like you were a painted galaxy, took days to fully wash out.
You swiped a pack of cigarettes from the corner store when the clerk wasnāt looking, and we only got a cigarette in before we tossed them out, laughing and coughing. Your throw landed them in the creek, and I started like I was going to fish them out, but you told me it was okay. We were going to be enablers of fish addiction. We started a fire.
My pen is tracing lines I donāt know the endpoints of before I make them. Itās only when I hold it out in front of me that I can see the general shape, can make out what it is that Iām sketching.
You said we were going to get married someday, that youād have my babies. We hadnāt even kissed yet. I laughed, sputtered out an, āIs that so?ā Flames played in your eyes. You said, āmmmhmm.ā
Midterms and finals and college searches. But you wouldnāt make it that far.
One day you were here, and the next you werenāt. Recited words and lit candles and crying eyes and offers of consolation. Days and nights of empty wandering in my room, thoughts moving from what I couldāve noticed to what I shouldāve done. Couldāve and shouldāve. Weeks melting like wax from a candled finger in reverse, working up the energy to take a shower, change my clothes, go to the corner store we used to haunt so I could put some food in my stomach, no matter how unhealthy it was.
Taking walks through the woods alone, thinking I saw you walking beside me, like a phantom limb you were, always attached to me. I kept walking.
My stop is coming up, but I have to finish this sketch first. It needs to have an ending.
One night long after it happened, I walked back out to our tree house. The tarp had sagged from the seasonās rain, branches bent, but it was still standing. I crawled underneath and sat in there, the moonlight becoming something different fed through the water-blue of the tarp, something new. You were almost there beside me.
Weāve already passed my stop, but thatās fine. The drawing is done. Itās us sitting under the tarp together, the glow of a portable screen on my face as you watch with your head on my shoulder, in a place we both know, back when time stood still.
Weāre in the dark, slow dancing to a song we barely know the words to, mumbling, mostly just picking up the melodies and harmonizing on the chori, making up our words and movements as we go till weāre melting together, here, at night, with the storm outside, with old Christmas lights strung up inside as the only light for us to dance by, something lofi, something chill, with words aching past quivering vocal cords, kissing every half step, sweat running down your forehead like the raindrops that are on the window, raining, trying to hold this moment in our hands like a childhood snowglobe thatās been scuffed but is still kept for sentimental value, moving past assuring each other that weāll end up together in the end, somehow, the finality of it like a semi truck sending us flying down concrete, knowing full well, now, that this is the last moment weāll ever spend together, that I have to leave, for reasons we didnāt want to face at first but now have to, waiting for something to happen, some epiphany, some moment like in a dream, like in a movie, then trying to forget it, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, conducting this moment like itās a symphony, and Iām trying to remember forever the shapes of your face, the curves of your body, wondering if there will be a satisfying denouement, some word at the end to make it right, or if death is always something that happens with a whisper and not a bang, and Iām wondering what itāll be like to be in my final moments, not just this one here with you but my last on Earth, if itāll be quick, they never really know do they, and youāre trying to console, trying to make this all okay, because thatās who youāve always been, using your half of the glass to fill mine, to make me see, to be my eyes, my light, my world, and it only makes sense that Iāll lose it all when I lose you, because the storm is starting to hit, and if you look close you can see the waves as they crash onto our block outside the window, the raindrops joined by branches and leaves, wind threatening to crack it, to break it all, and there was never any way out of this, no evacuation possible for us, no money for gas, never enough of anything but love for us, between us, and weāve decided that weāre going to slow dance in the dark for one more song and make it right in our own way.
You were always unavailable when I was single, and vice versa. Our feelings for each other would constantly reach dead ends, like wires crossed and sending only static. It was the opposite of synchronicity.
We spent many nights out at the old playground, swinging on creaky swings and watching our breath enter into the night. We’d talk about the afterlife, and art, and aliens, and anything else that entered our brains. Conversation was never difficult.
You’d sketch out little doodles for me, and I’d tell you all about the three act structure, characterization, and form. We’d watch movies, and I’d predict things a half hour before they happened. When you asked me how I did that, I’d let you peek behind the curtain too.
I wanted to so bad sometimes, but I never pushed things. I might not have always respected who you were with, but I respected you and your relationship with them. Months later, when we finally ended up together, you’d tell me how much you appreciated that, that I never came onto you or tried anything.
Kissing you for the first time was like taking a breath after being underwater for years. You’d think that feeling might fade, but it hasn’t happened yet. I don’t think it ever will.
It started with us slow dancing to āSyrupā by Company of Thieves on your fuzzy rug, my feet bare and yours wearing socks with cute skulls on them. Our steps were as tentative as our hands, not quite sure where to place them. Your hair hung in front of your eyes as you looked down to check where your feet were going, and when you looked back up, your eyes caught mine right as Genevieve crooned, āYour love syrup, so sweet, I feel dangerous indeed.ā
It felt like we were teenagers again, flirting, laying our words like playful traps and seeing what weād catch. I hadnāt done this in years, and neither had you. Itās amazing what you can get used to: the monotony of stale love, the painful acceptance that things will never change. But then they did, and we did, and it was awesome.
We were both veterans of abuse and mistreatment, and we agreed that that sort of stuff builds character, but between us we had enough character to last several lifetimes. It was time to just be happy. Every story needs drama, but sometimes that drama needs to be kept safely in the past. So we danced. YouTubeās autoplay algorithm was on point that night, moving seamlessly from one sweet song to the next. After a while it didnāt matter, though. We couldāve danced to anything.
When that was through, we went for a night walk, sky clear and stars shining through. I joked about how back home in Chicago I could hardly see anything because of the light pollution, that you should count yourself lucky you live in North Carolina where the stars are plentiful. We flirted some more as we walked, and I did that thing where I pretended to softly karate chop you. I did it just to have an excuse to touch you, and you knew that. You karate chopped back.
Itās all about timing with these things. Youād just gotten out of a toxic relationship, and I knew you were in no position to commit to anything right away. We danced with our words, too. You needed someone who could accept you āas you areā and do simple things with you like āgo on night walks.ā I insisted that there was āsomeone just like that out thereā and that āthey might be right there in front of you and you donāt even know it.ā You needed time, and I was willing to give it to you. You were worth the wait.
Before āSyrupā became our song, Iād listen to it again and again, seeing you in that relationship that was draining the life out of you. Iād wince every time it got to the end of the song, when Genevieve would lament that āitās a damn shame we couldnāt be.ā But dancing with you to that song for the first time, I couldnāt help but smile at those words, almost laugh at them. We were dangerous indeed.
When you needed support, I gave it to you. When you needed to hear that you could do it, I told you you would do it. My words werenāt empty, and you knew that. Years back, Iād been through the same thing, and Iād made it to the other side. And the dances continued, and the karate chops, and the night walks with stars that shifted their position in the sky as the days and weeks passed by.
Thereās something to be said for letting something bloom. For watering it, giving it sun, singing to it, and watching it go from nothing to something. Something to be said for letting things take their natural course, for trusting the flow of things. The flow of people, and events, and affection. It flows like syrup, so sweet.
I remember at a young age being at Chuck and Maryās house and seeing the framed picture Chuck had on the wall, a crying manās fingers trailing over the Vietnam Memorial Wall, his buddy reflected in the smooth stone, still in uniform. I didnāt have a way of conceptualizing any of what Chuck must have gone through at that point. War to me then was propping up green army men and zooming jeeps along the carpet by hand. I couldnāt understand Chuckās long pauses, the way he stared through things, the weight that each of his words carried.
Thereās no other way to say it: Chuck is one of the toughest people Iāve ever known, but the kind of tough person whose armored exterior hid a sweet and mushy interior. Heād die to protect the people he loved. He had a way of getting me exactly what I wanted for Christmas, giving a matter-of-fact āyouāre welcomeā when Iād jump up and down and scream āthank you.ā Heād take me aside, ask me about school, football, work, writing. I donāt know if he knew it while he was alive, but in a lot of ways, he was like a father figure to me.
As Chuck got older, his health deteriorated. He suffered illnesses I could never withstand, and he did it with grit, toughness, and humor. Maybe it was something he picked up in Vietnam, maybe it was just a part of him, but it seemed like nothing could keep Chuck down. I watched him lose weight dramatically, watched his mobility go away, watched him have to suffer the indignities of a body that simply didnāt want to do what he needed it to do.
As I grew up, Chuck went from being the guy whose presents I looked forward to every holiday to the guy who would level with me and talk through just about anything I was going through. Even as his body failed him, his spirit remained the same. It seemed like nothing could keep Chuck down.
Even to the very end, he remained that strong motherfucker, that guy who could disarm you with his dark humor and who hid how much he cared beneath his indomitable toughness. And sure, his humor got darker, and things pissed him off a bit more than they did before, but who could blame him? He was fighting the hardest battle of his life.
Chuckās passed, and the hole is there, but I donāt think heāll ever truly be gone. Heās just on the other side of the wall now, finally meeting up with his buddies after all these years. His body is strong again, and he can go where he wants to go, do what he wants to do. Not even death can keep Chuck down.
Itās going to be a Harry Potter party. I get my costume ready in the bathroom: hike up my skirt, get my makeup right, tousle my hair to look like Hermioneās. Youāre watching Netflix in the other room, trying to make it seem like you donāt care. Youāre still mad about me flirting with my coworker last week. I donāt know why I did it, but that didnāt stop me from calling you a baby. I donāt know why Iām doing the things Iām doing anymore.
I thought of inviting you, of introducing you to my new work friends, maybe trying to mend whatās been broken. But I didnāt. What I did was accept the invite, order the pieces I was missing from my costume, and hide the Amazon boxes once they got here. What I did was change my mind, wait till you got home, and try the costume on where I knew youād see me. And the way you tried to be nonchalant about hanging up your coat, but how your eyes trailed over me as you walked over to the closet. And when you didnāt say anything, when you started to walk away, how I asked you what you thought. How I looked. How your eyes showed your hurt, but you said I looked good. How you opened your mouth to say something, to ask something, but stopped yourself.
Itās gotten so Iāll stay at work till 7 or 8, tell myself I need to stay late to prepare for the next day, but I know that isnāt true. I know that I just want to walk past my coworker one last time and imagine what heād smell like on top of me. I know that heās staying late on purpose too, that weāre moving past each other over and over, closer and closer, waiting for one of us to bump into the other. Heās single, and I think about this as I fiddle with my engagement ring, as I pee one last time before heading home, staying in the stall so long that the lights automatically go off.
We havenāt fucked in weeks. I find an excuse every time, and when you remind me how long itās been, I go to the bathroom and use my vibrator. The last time I did this, I walked back in the room to find you jerking off, not bothering to hide it under the covers. You left yourself out for a while even after I walked in, and I acted like Iād seen nothing. I got into bed and under the covers, and when your foot touched mine, I told you to move over.
When we do touch, itās in the form of a play fight, and we grapple and vie for control because to hug and to hold would be too much at this point. But by the end of these play fights, weāre sweaty and tired, leaning up against each other like spent boxers, and youāll try to sneak a kiss. Iāll jerk my head away and tell you how sweaty you are. If youāre lucky, Iāll pretend to be dead weight, and youāll have to grab me and pull me back up. Youāll have to save me.
I think of all the ways I could end it. I could sit you down over dinner, or call you when Iām at my momās, or text you after work. I could pack up all my things and leave without saying a word. I could do these things, any of them, without hesitation. Donāt think I couldnāt.
When itās time to go to the party, I rush to get my shoes on before you can get up and go to the door. I just say, ābye,ā and I leave. I sneak out the bottle of Jim Beam Iāve stashed in my purse and nurse it for courage before getting on the CTA bus.
When I get there, I do that thing where I hug the wall, near my friends, and smile and nod when someone I know walks by and acknowledges me. My coworker spots me eventually, pours something I canāt see into a cup and brings it to me. He challenges my HP knowledge with some trivia, which I ace, but I smile anyway. He refills my cup and challenges me to a duel. Produces two wands and hands one to me. My cheeks burn as I smile and shake my head, but he challenges me loud enough that everyone hears. Gets everyone to clear out of the way and form a circle around us. Itās over in seconds: one shout of āExpelliarmusā and he tosses his wand high in the air. I send out my Patronus for good measure, but he surrenders.
An hour goes by, maybe two. My coworker and I stop drinking and just talk. When the party starts to thin out, he offers to give me a ride home. No sense in taking the CTA and dealing with weirdos, he says. I say yes.
When I tell him the address, he says heās just a couple blocks away. That weāre practically neighbors. Thereās silence for a while, and he says something about stopping by his place for coffee. So we can wake up. I say yes.
When heās inside of me, all I can think of is our first date, sneaking into the mall with you after watching a movie, getting into the playplace that was meant to be a forest and lying on the grass carpet as Snow Patrolās āChasing Carsā piped out of the mall speakers. How we were silent. How we had smiles, matching, unaware of the future. How we followed the songās advice and just lay there, our fingers intertwined.
Liza Olson 