Moments for Esperance

I took a breath, then held it. Not on purpose. I just couldn’t let it out. If I let it out, then it’s real. He’s really gone. Left me. For another woman. Probably with bigger tits.

Rachel texted me: “How you holdin’ up, girl?”

I replied: “I’m not. I’m not ready for any of this.”

“You’ll be fine,” she texted. Then: “Sorry I can’t be there with you. You know I’m no effing good at funerals.”

I sighed and shook my head, replied: “Yeah. I know.”

The funeral meant my family. I’d have to see my family. And not just Mom & Dad, but Sievers and Mandy and all the cousins. And they’d all have a million fucking questions, like, How’s Marc? Have you guys set a date yet? Is there gonna be a shotgun wedding? That one will be followed by laughter. And that’s just Marc. Then there’s work. How’s the job going? What is it you do again? I’ve heard there’s been terrible lay-offs in the tech sector this year. Good thing that didn’t happen to you, huh?

That one made my stomach turn, and I bent over and hugged my sides as hard as I could until I forced myself to exhale and stand up again.

But it really wasn’t that bad. They did a nice service that Ma-Maw would have liked. Well, as much as she’d liked anything, I guess.

“Look at that preacher,” her ghost said to me as I sat watching from the audience. Or the congregation. Whatever it’s called. “He’s fat,” Ma-Maw said.

“Ma-maw!” I yelled in a hushed whisper to her in my mind. “That’s not nice!”

Her ghost shrugged. “What? It’s true. And it’s my funeral. I didn’t know this man. It’s some hired fucking gun your mother found online.”

“You have quite a mouth on you today, missy,” I said mentally.

“I’m dead, sweetie. It doesn’t matter now. Nothing does,” she said.

“... Nothing does,” I whispered aloud at the same time.

Dad looked at me, but didn’t say anything. He just smiled, put his arm around me. I smelled his cologne and the scent of his suit jacket. Something about it reminded me of Marc–even though Marc didn't wear cologne and didn’t even own a suit. I thought I might cry. Which would be fine at a funeral, but I didn’t let myself. Not there.

At the wake, my cousins were totally cool, and no one asked me about anything other than how I was doing. It was broad and vague enough, and there were no intrusive follow up questions.

My cousin Callie had a new baby, who was super cute. Just a little bundle of joy. When I held her, I smelled her head. It was like the smell of immortality. Like I felt myself growing younger and stronger with each passing breath. And the innocence of an unspent life overtook me. I thought back on all the mistakes I’ve made, and how I must have been a total fucking disappointment to my parents as a kid. I wondered what kind of baby I was.

So I asked Mom at the dinner table. It was a buffet kind of deal, so we all had plates of grief chow.

“Mom?” I asked.

“Yeah, babe?” Mom asked, shoveling some kind of gel casserole into her maw.

“What kind of baby was I?” I asked.

“Shit, I don’t know, Amelia. The regular kind?” she said, then pawed at her lips.

Aunt Lillian offered something: “You liked to pee.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“To piss,” Mom clarified. “You pissed everywhere,” she made a waving gesture with her hand.

“Don’t all babies pee?” I asked.

“Oh sure,” Lillian said, “but you peed everywhere.”

“Everywhere,” Mom repeated with the hand gesture again.

“And you had these cowboy boots that you just adored,” Lillian said, as though she’s calling up a treasured memory, “and you pissed in those boots and wore them everywhere.”

“Didn’t anyone wash them?” I asked.

“We tried!” Lillian said and laughed.

“Tried soap, tried bleach …” Mom said.

“Bleach–really?” I asked with some bite. “You used fucking bleach on cowboy boots, Momma?”

Mom waved her hand. “You know what I mean. I tried everything.”

“I see,” I said and stopped asking questions about what I was like as a baby.

When I was driving home, I saw the outlet mall off the interstate. I passed it at first, but then got off, turned around, and went back. There’s a shoe store there. I went in and got myself a new pair of cowboy boots.

“Fuck you, Mom,” I said to myself as I stomped out of the store and got back into my car. “You too, Lillian. Assholes.”

That night, Rachel texted me: “What’s up, girl”

Me: “Nothin’. Bein’ sad. I did get cool new boots, tho”

I attached a pic.

“Bitchin’, cowgirl. Why don’t you come over and hang out with us?”

“Us?”

“My new roomie. Allison.”

Then: “She’s cool. You’ll like her.”

Me: “Okay.”

When I got there, my heart skipped a beat. I smiled and shook Allison’s hand, then found some stupid reason to talk with Rachel in the kitchen.

“What is it?” Rachel asked.

“Dude, she is fucking hot.”

Rachel smiled under her glasses and bounced her eyebrows. “Just what the doctor ordered, right?”

“Dude … she’s your roommate.”

“So?” Rachel said. “Better than an app.”

I sighed. “But what if it doesn’t work out?”

“It totally will,” Rachel said. “She’s so cool. And she’s into all the same weird movies and books and shit you’re into.”

“You mean science fiction?” I said flatly.

“Yeah!” Rachel said. “All that shit.”

I nodded.

Rachel wasn’t entirely wrong, though. Allison knew a lot more than most folks about sci-fi authors and had seen a decent amount of movies. Not as many as I had, but I would have been shocked if I met someone who had. And she was just … gorgeous. I couldn’t keep my heart down. It was warming me up, and speeding my thoughts. Too fast, really. Everything moved too fast, like it usually does with two girls.

We were in bed the next morning, and I was feeling incredible. It was like I’d turned a page or something. I’d found some I could be happy with. I could love and laugh with and share all my nerdy interests with.

And it went like that, you know, for awhile.

Then, about four months in, she ended it. Just like that.

I asked her why. “You’re kind of clingy?” Allison said. I remember: she was making a sandwich in her new place, the one that was supposed to be our place together. And I knew her new girlfriend, Tamara, was on the way, so I felt this kind of urgency, this rush to get answers.

“Clingy?” I asked.

Allison nodded. Her face was beautiful and calm. Focused on the lettuce and bread and things, but not so focused that it messed up her features or anything. I hated her for that. She just always looked fucking perfect, and I was a wreck.

“Clingy,” I said.

“Yep,” Allison said, blowing her bangs out of her eyes, then started putting ingredients away. About halfway through, she stopped, “Did you want one?”

“A sandwich?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

I sighed. “Sure.” Then, I bitchily added, “If it’s not too clingy.”

Allison frowned, but then made me a sandwich.

We ate together. We talked about something. I don’t remember what. I couldn’t feel anything except for this fucking sandwich being ground to bits between my teeth, a little at a time. Each swallow took forever and felt huge–almost like when you’re stoned. But I wasn’t stoned. I should get stoned, I thought.

So I bought a dime off Allison and went to Monjenner Park. I rolled a joint and smoked it.

A cop knocked on my window, and I about came out of my fucking skin.

We chatted about something, then he looked around and asked for a hit.

I was really stoned, so I made sure I heard him right. “Excuse me, officer. Did I hear you correctly?”

He chuckled. “Yeah, don’t narc on me, okay?”

“Uh, okay?” I said, then handed him the joint.

He hit it like a man who’s hit a lot of joints, then handed it back to me.

“Don’t get caught,” he said and tapped the roof of my car, then walked off.

“I thought it was legal now?” I asked him, but he was already too far away to hear me.

I listened to some Xmas music. It was Jessie James Decker’s version of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” that broke me. I started balling. We were going to do all that shit together, I thought. It’s supposed to be the most wonderful time, not … this.

A few weeks later, I was at my annual. Cynthia has that fucking thing in my snatch and is trying to talk to me about some new jet skis she got, and that she and her husband are loving their new lake house, and I was like, “Uh huh …”

Then she asks me, “Any chance you’re pregnant?”

“No,” I said. “Not possible. My last partner was a ciswoman.”

Cynthia frowns. “A what?”

I sigh. “A girl.”

“I thought you said your fiance’s name was Marc?”

Again, I sighed. “Yes, that's right.”

“And she’s a woman, Marc?”

“No. Marc’s a man. A very manly man. Kind of a douchebag, actually.”

“Oh!” Cynthia said, then made a snort.

“Yeah. So that ended. Then I dated this super pretty pharma rep named Allison. And she kind of broke my heart …”

I started crying. I didn’t want to. Not there. Not in front of fucking Cynthia. But I did. And I let it out. I let it all out. About Ma-Maw dying, and getting laid off after I helped them recover, like, four million dollars in lost business. About Allison and fucking Tamara living in our apartment.

Cynthia was surprisingly good at listening. Once I’d poured it all out, she said, “Life sucks, Amelia.”

I blinked at her. “Huh?”

“Yeah,” Cynthia said. “You think I like looking at sick vadges all day?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it, I guess.”

“Yeah, no,” Cynthia said. “I don’t. I hate it. Not yours. Yours is fine, by the way. Everything looks great in there.”

I made a face and nodded.

“But life is hard,” she said. “It’s just miserable people making everyone fucking miserable and pretending like it’s all for some purpose.”

“It’s not?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly, and as she did, I realized Cynthia had had the same hairstyle for, like, ten years.

“Nope,” she said. “None whatsoever. It’s just chaos. People playing grabass and making toys and stealing toys and slapping each other. It’s a nightmare.”

I nodded. “I mean, that sounds true.”

“It is,” Cynthia said. “That’s free, by the way. Can’t bill your insurance for life advice, right?” She laughed, and so did I, though I didn’t know why.

She popped her latex gloves off, then told me to see Becca at the desk for the copay and that she would see me next year.

Outside, I walked down the street in my new cowboy boots, thinking about that: that nothing is for anything. There isn’t any big reason behind it. And somehow, I felt better. Like I could drop the act, that all this suffering was somehow noble or that I’d win a fucking award or something. Or that someone–the right one–would love me and make it all better.

That’s never going to happen, I thought.

Then Ma-Maw’s ghost said, “You don’t know that, Amelia.”

“All I meant, Ma-Maw, was that maybe I shouldn't be trying to build my life around that.”

“Have you been?” she asked.

I thought about it. “Kind of?”

“Think about it some more,” she said.

I did, as I walked through downtown. It occurred to me that even in month seven of being unemployed, I was fine. I had plenty of money saved up. I had some job offers. I didn’t like any of them, so I hadn’t said yes. But I could. And I had people who were into me. Like Joel. And Monet. I didn’t really want to date either of them, but I could.

“I’ve been thinking about all this the wrong way,” I said. “I can be happy.” I said it again because it felt like a victory. “I can be happy!”

Some lady on the street heard me and looked at me, smiled, kept walking.

I felt alive, maybe for the first time in a long time. I let it fill me, and I put some strut into my cowgirl stride. I had turned a corner.

And I did turn the corner. And there’s Marc. With Meegan. I was pretty sure her name was Meegan. There at the French restaurant he used to take me to, feeding each other food, looking ‘Grammable in the light snowflakes.

It almost threw me. But I saw it. I caught it. I remembered what else happened. I remembered baby immortality. I remembered new boots and that there is no purpose to any of this. And my life doesn’t have to be built around anything at all.