Brief Lives

Green Grass, Stone

I know you’re dead. They told me with the kind of voice people use for children and for the unwell: gently, choosing each word one at a time.

I nodded. I said yes, I understand, thank you. I shook the hands of strangers. I accepted condolences from people who knew nothing about us.

But I hadn’t understood. How do you accept that you are dead? You, who were always on the verge of leaving and coming back. How does one come to realise that this time is different? That this time the boundary is not a door, not a train, not the silence of three weeks that used to break with a phone call from you at eleven at night — are you awake? — as if I hadn’t stayed awake on purpose, as if I hadn’t kept the phone close through all those nights.

The first time you left, I was twenty-eight years old and I thought I would die.

I didn’t die. That’s the problem.

I stayed on my feet. I learned to sleep on my side of the bed, without sliding toward the middle in the night. I stopped buying that wine you loved, the one I never cared for. I cleared your things from the bathroom — not right away; it took me months — and put mine back in their place. I replaced the mug with the broken handle, the one you never threw away, with a new mug, intact, without a history. I built a life that didn’t have your shape. It took years. Orderly years, a little grey, but functional. Years that didn’t hurt every day — only sometimes: when I walked past the café where we used to sit in summer, or heard that song you played too loud. Then you’d return for an instant, and then vanish.

I had learned to let you vanish.

And then you came back. For real.

Don’t ask me how. Don’t ask me why I let you in, why I opened that door again. You already knew back then, when you rang the buzzer and said only: It’s me.

You had changed. More worn, perhaps. More real. You carried something around your eyes that hadn’t been there before; not wrinkles, but something that resembled awareness.

I let you in.

I always let you in. That is the uncomfortable truth of thirty years of my life: for you, I always found a way to give way, even when I had decided not to. Your voice was enough. Your name on the screen was enough. The sound of you breathing on the other end, silent, waiting, was enough.

And this time it was different. It didn’t resemble the fervour of the early years. It was something quieter: an understanding that had no need to perform itself. We still argued, of course. But with less bile, with a good kind of weariness, with a certainty — new, fragile, real — that after the quarrel we would still be there. Neither of us kept a suitcase ready under the bed.

On Sunday mornings you would cook — badly, you always cooked badly — and leave everything in disarray. The smell of burnt onion would drift all the way into the bedroom. I said nothing. Or I said something and you laughed, and that was enough. You’d sit on the windowsill with your coffee and stare outside, bare feet on the stone ledge even in winter. I watched you from behind, without you knowing, and I thought: this is what I meant when I used the word home.

So little was enough. It took us thirty years to discover it, and then there wasn’t enough time left to live inside it.

At the head, grass. At the feet, a stone.

The smell of the cypress trees reached me at once: resinous, cold, a smell that does not belong to the living. It brought me to you: to the Sunday morning when you had climbed a ladder to prune the plant on your parents’ terrace, and I had watched from below, anxious and useless, while you laughed and told me I was overreacting. Your hands were green with resin. When you climbed down I had taken you by the wrists and said: don’t ever do that again. And you had laughed again.

I closed my eyes. I breathed in once more.

Then I opened them and looked at that precise and silent earth, and I could not find you anywhere in it. Because you were never precise, and never silent. You were sinuous, disorderly, loud. Even when you were quiet, something in you was always in motion: a swinging leg, fingers drumming, a foot searching for the rhythm of a song only you could hear.

I stared at that stone with your name on it and I thought: no. They’ve got it wrong. She is somewhere else. She’s on the seven-twenty train, she’s at a café table I don’t know.

Then I thought: no. Not this time. This time you are in one place only, for the first time. In a precise, motionless, final place. You are in a place you will not leave. You, made of departures and returns. You, who didn’t know how to keep still even in sleep.

Now you are still.

And I don’t know what to do with this quiet I did not choose. I don’t know how one goes on living knowing that the buzzer will never ring again, that there will be no more phone calls at eleven at night, no more voice saying my name as though it were a question. I don’t know how one learns, again, to sleep on one’s own side of the bed, when this time not even hope is left.

I know you’re dead.

This morning, coming back from the cemetery, I stopped. I saw your green hands again, the ladder, your laughter. I saw the windowsill and the coffee. Everything at once, in a single second, without order.

Then I bought that wine. The one you loved.

I opened it.

I poured a glass.

It tasted awful.

I finished it anyway.