24
Summer died on the eleventh of July.
I don’t remember much about that first day or so, and not just because of the lingering effects of the sedative. It exists in my memory only as a deep, murky pond. The doctors called it a grief blackout. I just called it the worst fucking thing ever. I remember shouting into pillows, staring at walls until I wanted to die, rolling over and over and over on my bed until I had nothing left to cry out anymore. Except it wasn’t so much “crying” as just this wild, guttural, furious sound that bubbled up from somewhere deep and dark within me, a sound I didn’t even know I could make, a sound that would come until I’d forget I hadn’t taken a breath in thirty seconds and would nearly pass out. I did that until I drained all my tears, and then I just started shaking and dry heaving while my mom sat by my bed trying to reason with me. And that was the saddest thing, that I was out of tears. Because there would never be enough tears for Summer.
The pain was literally physical – every inch of me ached and wished and missed. It was a pain that burned. A hole had opened up within me, and I spent every second creeping around it, sometimes falling in, sometimes not. Sometimes the hole fooled me into thinking it had disappeared for a moment, but then I’d remember that Summer no longer existed and I’d be tossed in again, and then I’d hit the concrete with everything in me and find myself back at square one.
I felt everything and nothing. I was so numb and so angry. I felt so bad for her. I wanted to take her place. I wanted to join her, sail off the edge of the pier at low tide, to meet her in the vast sea of nothingness and not feel this pain anymore. And the only thing that kept me from doing that was knowing how thoroughly it would destroy my mother.
~
No matter how I looked at it, it just wouldn’t make sense to me, the concept of her being gone. It wasn’t supposed to be so sudden. I knew she’d always talked about numbers and Scrabble and odds and all that, but that was hypothetical – this was real life. And this wasn’t supposed to happen. Maybe she’d been preparing us – maybe she was letting us know anything could happen, and in her case, “anything” meant the worst. The anger was the worst part. Okay, the thousandth worst part. I just couldn’t fathom how such beauty, such grace, such perfection, could just die on an operating table so pointlessly. Her death had been a crack of lighting on a perfectly clear day. It was such a waste. She was fun and interesting and elegant and she made everything better. And she was so funny – the world was so much less funny without her, that’s something I noticed immediately. I wanted to reach out and touch her, but there was no Her to touch. It became this horrifyingly simple urge, impossible to understand but wholly sensible at the same time, totally alien and almost primitively deep, a shallow panic that hinted at a deeper chaos: I want to touch her I want to touch her I want to touch her I can’t I can’t I can’t Oh my God oh my God oh my God Where is she where is she where is she where is she She’s gone she’s gone she’s gone. She was everywhere and nowhere and nothing and she was gone.
I do remember bruising my knuckle. After twenty-four hours or so I thought I finally felt like eating again, if for nothing else than my own survival, and so I dragged myself into the kitchen and looked into the refrigerator and saw a Powerade I’d put there the week before. That made me think of how in that one week Summer had left, but that stupid fucking bottle was still right where I’d put it, and then I thought that maybe if I touched it again everything would go back to how it had been the last time I’d touched it, and that if I could retrace my steps I could somehow unkill her and make her undead. So then I touched the bottle and thought of how fucking awful it was that the placement of a Powerade had outlasted the love of my life, and then I punched the fucking wall, because like golf balls to the head and flu cells to the mouth, sometimes it was the little things that hit you the hardest. A knuckle was nearly broken but I didn’t care. Summer was gone. All the life had left Summer, and all the light had left my life. It was like the surgeon had killed two people instead of one.
I knew I deserved the pain, though. The worst of the worst parts was that I felt complicit in her death. I couldn’t get rid of that thought, actually. My relationship with Summer had no doubt added stress to her body during her last months. After our fight had come her collapse; after our trip had come her blood. Would she still be around had she never met me? Had her desire for love consumed her and killed her? Had the Spark app been Summer’s version of Princess Diana’s dark Paris tunnel or Marie Antoinette’s guillotine? Had love been her road to death?
Death. Even the word had claws.
So after visiting the ER for my hand – at a different hospital than the one that had killed Summer, don’t worry – I went back to the refrigerator with a manic burn in my throat and headed straight for my mom’s occasionally-used alcohol shelf. After swallowing a pain pill I’d been given in the ER I ripped the cap off a bottle of cheap white wine and drank the whole thing, the sweet sweet liquid meeting my tongue and exploding into a million rays of sunlight that finally soothed me, dancing with my taste buds in a heady golden reverie. And then I took another bottle and drank it, too, and then I drank another, and then I took a Xanax and drank even more, until I couldn’t feel anymore.
Until I couldn’t think anymore.
Until my girlfriend wasn’t dead anymore.