They followed you to Dublin. Every time you went somewhere new, something in you hoped they would stay behind, as if they were tied to a place instead of to your brain. But they always came back.
In Dublin they usually only came to you when you were alone. Stress and isolation brought them out, as they always did; there was no getting away from them when the neighborhood thugs were breaking your windows, or when Barry was in the hospital, leaving you alone in the house. It was Halloween week — of course it was — and the local kids were building so many bonfires and setting off so many fireworks that it sounded like a warzone.
They only came to you one time when you were with Barry. You were cuddling each other in bed, when you looked over his shoulder and saw one by the window.
He held you and just told you over and over that it wasn’t real. But he was.
One friend just got married. One is in love. One just celebrated his anniversary.
One is talking about having kids someday. One just had his third.
You read every email, every tweet, every blog post, every Google+ update. You look at every photo.
And you tell them you’re happy for them.
They brought him up in your third week. His face was covered in gauze. He sat in his room, upright in his bed; you never saw him leave it.
None of the orderlies talked about him, but one of the other patients said he heard he’d set himself on fire.
Every time you went by his door, you couldn’t help but look at him, wondering if he was looking back — and if he was, what he was seeing.
You stayed with him as long as you did, and tried as hard as you did, because sometimes he was still the boy you fell in love with. Every once in a while, there was still something of that gentle laughing boy in his eyes, a certain turn in his voice to let you know he was still in there somewhere.
Sometimes when he laughed, it was so easy to forget that he was ever angry.
You’ve always needed a fan beside your bed to sleep with. When you were a baby sleeping in the crib, they told you it was the only thing that would stop your crying and calm you down; and when you’ve traveled, you often made your first stop at a store to buy a fan to take back to your hotel room. Even in winter, even in Utah and Dublin, no matter how much colder it made the room, there was just no getting to sleep for you without its ambient hum.
There was never in all your life such a thing as silence. There was the distant drip of faucets, there were televisions playing in other rooms. The creak of settling houses, the shush of low winds. Something was always moving somewhere.
And even when the world was quiet, your mind never ran out of things to fill it with.
You’re sitting in Barry’s dad’s car at night while he’s run into the store on some errand, the rain is pouring down and you see people in the shops, people passing by on the streets, buzzing in and out of some pub. Talking and moving too goddamned fast.
You look at them through the rain-spattered window and feel a kind of anger at them, the purest and rawest rage you’ve ever felt in your life. How can you be doing this?, you want to yell out. Why haven’t you stopped?
Didn’t you know everything was supposed to stop?
It swallowed you up, warmly, gratefully: it was final now. There was no going back; neurotic control freak that you always were, you could finally feel what it was like to just let the fuck go of everything. You’d thought that maybe “your life would flash before your eyes,” that you’d play out some highlight reel of your greatest hits and misses: the friends and lovers, the abusers and betrayers, everywhere you’ve been, everywhere you never got to go, all the beauty, all the bullshit — maybe thirty-plus years of unspent anger would finally burst out in one self-righteous volcano, or maybe you’d just say a quiet self-serving goodbye to a parade of shadow faces, pleading for their understanding (and if they ever knew you at all, of course they’d understand, of course they’d forgive), wishing them love.
But there were no faces, not even Barry’s; there were no instant replays, no deleted scenes, no director’s commentary. You really were letting go, and it was the last great good feeling you were still capable of.
There had been enough tears, enough screams, enough soul-fatigue, that night after his funeral and every night since he died: the grief was both hollowing you out, and only scratching the surface, at the same time. You never second-guessed what was next for you, you never even stopped to think about it as such; you even imagined that anyone concerned, anyone who had the slightest idea of what it was like for you spending your life in your fucked-up head — well, they’d expect it, wouldn’t they? If not expect, then at least not be surprised. Sad, of course; there was no getting around that, you knew it even then, and you wished like hell that you could avoid it but you just didn’t have it in you to even consider it; they could be sad, yes, you could see that.
But not surprised.
They said there was no way you could’ve known, nothing you could’ve done.
They said it was so sudden for [him/her] and that that was a kind of blessing.
They said at least [he/she] isn’t in any more pain now.
They said [he/she] knew that you loved [him/her].
They said so many things.
The water washes over you as you prop yourself up against the shower wall in a half-push; it’s gripped you inside again as if it had just happened. Your brain’s spinning off numbly on its own track as it always does, projects you have to get back to, random pieces of random songs on a loop, something you need to e-mail so-and-so about, all the little drops of dulled experiences, fresh again for one slippery moment — and there it is again, and that’s all that there is until you can get ahold of yourself again, the ice forms in the pit of your stomach as if it had only been minutes ago, not years.
You can still pretend you know what “okay” means, and have entire days go by when you could just about fool yourself that you are — and suddenly your throat’s closing in on itself again and there’s one more hour, one more night, where no time has ever gone by at all.
The water drones over you. The old ghosts just take new forms, swap masks with each other, peeling away one more little part of you each time they wheel around whatever’s left; grief and rage and all the rest keep coming and going, boiling you back down to the smallest sense of yourself again, numb and drained dry and far away.
Some of the ghosts always come back.
Some of them never really leave.
