December 10
I walk outside and lean against the railing of my porch, watching the sunlight fade to grey over the pier as I shiver in the autumn wind. The breeze is barely below nippy, and yet I have never been so cold. A boat passes by the pier, churning up a trail of bubbles in the water behind it. The water glows green with phosphorescent plankton, bringing me back to that old triumphant time on the sea when I’d owned the streets of Jax Beach and everything in the world seemed right.
I am in withdrawal from the summer of Summer. Not just from her, but from the days when the air was warm and the ocean was green and I was happy and free. I ache for her, I pine for happiness and love, I can’t read a book because no fantasy matches up with the reality of last June. Nothing compares to her, to those days we shared. Nothing at all. How do you move past three perfect months with the best person in the world? You can’t. Grief has swallowed me whole. And how do you grow back into a world that has cut you out of itself?
The days and weeks since July Eleventh have bled together like a bad movie. And not just any bad movie, but a really cheesy one, the kind that play on TBS on Thursday and make you want to change the channel even when your remote is hopelessly lost in your mess of blankets. I used to feel like a brand new person when it was good and cool in the fall, but not this year. When I’m not in bed I walk the sidewalks at night, listening to the streetlights hum on their poles. I have never really been actively suicidal up until now, but I can admit that on a totally rational level, being nothing and nowhere would be easier than living in the hell I call home. The only thing that scares me about the whole suicide thing is the moment of death itself, the pain, but that can be fixed with some pills and alcohol, anyway…
Her legacy is evaporating. Her lessons are dropping away. Sometimes it’s almost like she was never here. I touch her things to know she was here once, and it does nothing. It’s almost like our memories don’t exist now that she doesn’t anymore. And it’s making me disappear, too. Sometimes I almost find myself missing her death and the immediate aftermath, because even though I was lost in anger and shock, at least I still felt something. I feel nothing now. And I’d rather see black than grey. I used to walk through the streets and see stories in people’s faces, feel novels in their eyes. I found inspiration in the air I breathed. Now I’ve got nothing. I feel so old. I miss being young and careless, when the world was still a mystery. Before it all went blank. And the blankness is what makes me want to walk out on the porch and dive into the concrete driveway below, return to Summer, and hold her hand for ten thousand years.
And don’t get it twisted: it wasn’t always like this. I felt so strong at the funeral, my sails so full of some ghoulish wind – I wanted to write a dozen books, save the world, win for all the people who couldn’t anymore. But the adrenaline faded from my veins like a dying sun at dusk, and just as quickly I was on the floor again, praying to the past. Grief is like losing your leg mid-marathon and then being forced to keep running. And the weird thing is, you start enjoying the pain.It is almost shocking to me, how perfectly I can still remember her, how accurate the version is of her that presents itself to me in my dreams. I can perfectly harken the exact pitch of her voice, the way she looked down when she was feeling shy, theway she smelled like the beach.I can even remember the way she looked at me, with this longing that slammed into me and made everything else in the world not matter anymore.Sometimes I think I’m imprisoned in a cavern of my own memories, cursed to melancholia forever. But then I see her, and it’s better again, at least for a moment. And maybe if I die I’ll be able to join her forever. But does it work that way? I don’t know, and that’s the only reason I haven’t made the decision yet.
Back in July, I couldn’t go to her burial. I couldn’t even fathom that my girl was going to be lowered into the ground and buried under a pile of dirt, actually. I wanted to collapse into a pile of nothing just thinking about it. And I couldn’t listen to some priest who had met her twice talk about how amazing she was, and that the darkest time of night is just before morning, and how we wouldn’t notice peaks without valleys, and yadda fucking yadda. Hers was my story to tell, or not tell, or whatever I chose to do. I’d said my goodbyes, and I couldn’t say them again, because above all I was simply a coward.
I walked to my mom’s car and started to get in. I wanted to drive, even though I was shaking. That much I wanted to be able to control. People could die, worlds could fall apart, but I could still drive.
“No,” my mom said as she held out her arm from her wheelchair. “You’re not driving, Cooper. Go around.”
“I can’t go to the burial,” I said as I walked around the car and fell into the seat.
“Then let’s skip the burial. Okay?”
“Okay.” I lay my head in my mom’s lap and cried like a little boy because my girl was a memory now.
But still, it was amazing, the springs of joy that erupted during those first few weeks after the big blow. You think you see a sign from them and it connects you to a memory and suddenly: bam, they’re alive again, flesh and blood, and you’re on top of the world. You’ll get that dream job! You’ll write that book! You’ll win at life for your lost loved one and your family and all the people who can’t win anymore! And five minutes later, you’re on the ground. Now I just feel nothing, like after you wake up in the early evening after a too-long nap and feel dead to the world. On good days I chase the things that used to give me good feelings, like sunsets and long walks on the beach and all that other bullshit, but nothing works. Summer was my feeling. My teenage dream is gone.
And speaking of dreams, they’re the most jarring parts of everything, actually. Nothing cheesy happens, like her white-shrouded form beckoning me to heaven or anything. She’s just sort of there, just out of reach, billowing in the lovely wind, and sometimes I can’t even see her, I just sense her presence. I know she’s frustrated about something, I just have no clue what it is. But she’s mad, I know that much. And in my dream I want her to get happy, so I try to console her, but I can’t find her. And then I wake up and fall into hell all over again. And sometimes, when I wake up screaming, I almost wish that she would leave me alone. I’m in love with her, but seeing her again is so traumatizing. I feel beyond guilty for admitting this, but sometimes I want her to just let me be. To leave. I’m dying here – can’t she see that she’s got me locked in her prison? What’s the point of keeping me miserable? If she has to go, why won’t she just…go? And am I the worst person in the world for thinking these things, or what?
I shuffled through my day today, as bleak as always. After dinner I find myself craving Starburst, specifically the pink ones, because Summer was a pink Starburst. She was special and unique and better than the rest. So I walk to the Laundromat a few blocks away, specifically to the vending machines around the side by the bathrooms. I stop in front and read the sign a Laundromat employee had handwritten and taped to the darkened glass: THE LIGHT IS BROKEN INSIDE BUT I STILL WORK, it said.
“I feel ya, machine,” I say as I sigh and reach into my pocket for some change. “I feel ya.”
Then I look at the date on my phone. Five days until Summer’s birthday. Five days until…
What, exactly?
I walk home alone. On the hardest nights I slide into delirium and imagine she’s still here, that she was just having one of those periods where she’d withdraw into herself and not text me for a day. Because my visions were the only place I could still hold onto her. She’s just in her room, lost in a good book, I’d tell myself over and over again as I sobbed, holding myself in bed. Yeah, that’s right – she’s just lost in herself again. She’ll be back. My girl will be back.
My baby had always been untouchable. Closed-door eyes, that soft faraway voice, that stooped posture that somehow only drew you in even more. She had always been out to sea, but now she was invincible – whenever I closed my eyes, at least.
In a fit of tears I retreat to my room and write Summer a poem called Rabbit Hole. I wanted to write about my baby, even if the inspiration is mostly gone and everything I come up with is shit. Writing used to be the most dysfunctional, toxic, and rewarding relationship I’d ever had – besides with Summer’s ghost, of course. I can’t really even describe my relationship with my pen: that fucking bitch is the greatest joy of my life. If I write, I bleed. But if I walk away from my pen, I’m dead. Like a two-headed parasite, we eat away at each other. There is no separation: I am writing and writing is me. And sometimes we kill each other and I go black. My feelings eat their way out of me through my pen, and if I don’t get them out I will fill up with the toxins and poison myself. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
But all that went out the door the day she died. I have barely written a word in months.
This is what I come up with tonight:
I know I was lost
God knows I took a few wrong turns on the way to Grown-Up Land and fell down the rabbit hole
but for one burning moment I had you by my side while we drifted
and darling
wandering through the madness with you made all the difference
Just as I finish, my mom knocks on my door. I know it’s her because nobody else ever comes here anymore – my friends have drifted, and understandably so. I’m a mess. I would probably drift from myself, too.
“Cooper, what are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
She breathes so hard, I hear it through the door. “I heard you messing around at your desk. You’re writing?”
Her voice is so full of hope, it breaks my heart. I’d been moping around for so long, doing nothing with myself, that just the scratch of my pen is making her rejoice. Ugh. How do mothers know so much, anyway? “Just…it’s nothing,” I say, hoping to bury the matter.
“Okay, well…speaking of that…I have something for you.” She pushes open the door, wrings her hands together in her wheelchair. Some kind of notebook is in her hands.
“What’s that?”
She stares at the floor. “You’re going to hate me, but…I Xeroxed your journals.”
I sit totally still. “What journals?”
“The...the ones you finished after Summer died.”
My mind races away from me. My account of the summer…the pages I’d thrown into her casket in a rage of grief…
“You didn’t,” I say. She wrings her hands together harder.
“On the morning of the funeral, you were still asleep, and…well, I found the book and copied it in the workroom. The cancer book.”
“What? Mom!”
“I know, I know, but…”
“No, there is no but! I hate when you touch my writing! It’s personal!”
“Well I figured I knew what you were going to do with it, and I was right – you did!”
“What?”
“I knew you would burn the pages or just throw them away, like you always do. What else am I supposed to do to save your work, and convince you that it’s worthwhile? Do something with your talent, Cooper.”
After I don’t respond, her eyes soften. “Oh, Coop. I didn’t mean it like that. You’ve got it bad right now, and I know that. But you don’t understand: you owe it to yourself to write. You owe it to everyone to write. One book can change the world, Cooper. One novel can touch souls, as cheesy as it sounds. Actually, I just read this book about a guy and a girl who fall in love one summer, and then the girl passes away-”
“What kind of sick fuck would want to read a book like that?”
She holds up a hand, looking stronger than she had in years. “Let me finish. It remade my world, Cooper. It changed me. I look out the window in the morning and I am happier to be here because of that book. And you can do that. You can write that book. I’ve seen your stories, and you have the power to help. You have the power to write someone’s One Great Book. Everyone knows you do. So do it. Turn your fear into fire,” she finishes, quoting my favorite singer, Saviour. I stare at the floor as my heart pounds. Then my mom sniffs. Her voice is smaller, somehow further away.
“And you gotta do it for her, you know,” she tells the floor. “For Summer. You need to read this diary. You need to see how much beauty she left behind. And how much love she gave you. You have to turn this into something positive. I mean, you almost died for this story – don’t let life silence you now.”
I say nothing.
“And how do you think I feel?” she asks, and now she’s crying a little. “I’ve been through things too, you know. Horrible things. But I have no voice – I can’t write. I’ll never be able to share anything. Nobody will ever learn anything from my life…”
Oh, Mom.
I get up and hug her, something that has gotten a lot easier since Summer died. Her tears drip all over my shirt, but I don’t mention it. She needs me. “You’re wrong. I learned everything from you, Mom,” I say into her ear. “Dad left and your health took a dive and everything went to hell and yet you still stayed around. You kept going. You’re so brave and you don’t even know it. You used to love to put on Fleetwood Mac and cry when you were sad, right?”
She nods.
“Well, you’re my Landslide – you taught me how to feel.”
She rocks back and forth for a few minutes. Finally she pushes me away and wipes her face. “Ugh. I’m just going to leave this on the desk,” she says after she gets herself together. “If it’s gone in the morning, I won’t ask for it back. Okay?”
I stare at the wall. I can tell she wants to ask something else. Finally, she does.
“Do you hate her?” she says to the darkness. “You seem so…angry all the time. Sullen. Do you hate Summer for doing this to you? Because it’s been months, and you’re not getting any better, and…”
I open my mouth to speak, then close it. The truth is…
The truth is that I have no idea what the truth is. She knew she was dying all that time, and she said nothing.
“What an insane thing to ask,” I tell my mom. “I loved her. Why would you even ask me that question?”
“I loved someone once too,” she says. I stare into her eyes, trying to remember the layers of brown and green for posterity, just in case I kill myself and never see them again. “He was tall and charismatic and-”
“Don’t talk about him,” I say, turning away. “Not now. Not in relation to Summer. He was stupid and she was perfect and I hate him and-”
“I don’t,” she says, and I got even madder.
“You don’t hate him? Are you serious? He was a worthless drunk and a terrible husband and father and, oh, he hit you, I remember, he hit you at that picnic behind that fence and you tried to act like it never-”
“Oh, he was a lazy, abusive piece of garbage, I don’t deny that for a second. But he left me with something. Something I’m looking at right now. And because of that, I will love him forever, in my own way.”
I turn and play with my fingernails, tears burning my eyes, until she finally tosses the book onto my desk and wheels away.
After the dust settles, I take out my iPad while some reality show about fishing plays unnoticed on my TV. I try not to think about it, but I can’t stop. That stupid book is pulling me in, drawing me forward with some energy I can feel but not see. I can’t believe it’s here: my book, my journal of our love. (I titled it THIS IS NOT A CANCER BOOK because of everyone falsely attributing Summer’s health issues to cancer – sort of a grim little inside joke, I guess.) Reading it would be stupid, masochistic, reckless, I tell myself. I don’t know why I would ever want to face that. Not here, at least. Not now. Now when I’m already so far from the summer.
But then again…
Ahh, I think as I sink into the possibilities my mother’s nosiness has suddenly presented me with. I think of drifting into the summer again in the pages of that book: I see hazel eyes staring at me from the St. Augustine humidity, I see images of sea oats rippling in the July wind. And how much more is in there? What a dream it would be, to return like that. And what a magnificent nightmare. But am I really crazy enough to do it?
No, I decide. But I am bored enough. I need to do the thing that makes me feel alive again – write – and to do that, maybe I need to go back to the thing that almost killed me. And might still kill me, depending on what I decide before the fifteenth.
And so for the lack of anything better to do, I open the book, take a breath, and start reading.