Like Juggling Knives in the Dark

It hurts to look at you. In its electronic naïveté, believing that of course all photos stored on it must contain fond memories, my iPhone has served up a slideshow. These photos, which I took in the first few months of our relationship, feature mostly you. You sitting across from me at a breakfast café, smiling at me, showcasing that dimple I loved to run my lips over. You twisting across a dance floor, your six-foot frame neither awkward nor gawky but perfectly aligned with the music. Your long blonde hair, not yet beginning to thin, glinting like autumn in the dusky red light. Your beauty glowing, a white blade in the soft near-darkness of the club.

Now you no longer go to clubs or breakfast cafés or Philadelphia or anywhere at all outside of your room. Now your room is full dark, all the time. Your eyes are dark, your voice is dark, your whole heart dark like a clock that has stopped. My heart is dark too. It’s grown twisted and gnarled and black after a year of caring for you. And from other things, too, things that go further back than that.

Maybe it’s not the iPhone that’s stupid. Maybe it’s me. After all, why keep photos unless you want to revisit them? What other point would there be? It would be like keeping photographic evidence of a crime you wish was never committed.

You’re not beautiful anymore. Now your height only emphasizes how emaciated you’ve become. Now your knees make shapes like rocks, like fists, under the bedcovers; tendons and cartilage stand out in your neck. Your face sucks itself in like a lake draining dry. Now your hair has stopped thinning and has instead transformed into a ghostly fuzz that resembles lanugo.

Now talking to you is like juggling knives in the dark. Whenever I say anything intended to be comforting, you warp it into something condescending. When I sigh, you act as though the sigh is not merely an expression of bodily exhaustion, but a statement on how tired I am of you and how much I want to be rid of you. And whenever I’ve had enough of your insults—your aggression, the expensive porcelain shattered on the floor—and finally snap at you, you only smile. You smile that slow smile of yours, the shape of the disease stretching itself all the way across your mouth, and nod with satisfaction. This is the only thing that brings you pleasure, now.

Even in the time before you got sick—those two years after the honeymoon phase was well and truly over, and we were both in that unnamed black period that came after, down in the pit of it together—things other than my despair brought you pleasure. My despair did bring you pleasure, but so did Dostoevsky. Horror movies. Walks in the mountains. The color blue, and how I looked in it. Kissing me in public, even when people stared. Especially when people stared. And, at parties where people assumed I was your sister or your friend, grinning and announcing loudly: “Actually, she’s my girlfriend.” The word girlfriend like a tiny, sweet strawberry in your mouth.

I go to church to please my mother. I go to escape her judgmental stare, her hope—lurking just behind the glassy rims of her eyes—that maybe, since our relationship was one of sin, your death will somehow cancel it out. I breathe in the resiny scent of the pew while thinking that my mother is wrong. Even here, the rosary beads, slipping and clacking against one another, remind me of bones.

You pass just before fall slides into winter. I’m glad of this; winter was your least favorite season. Your rages were terrible even when you were healthy. I once suggested that you might have Seasonal Affective Disorder, and you sneered at me—your dimple mocking me now, where before it had called to me—and told me not to bring up psychological bullshit. “Do I look like someone who needs to see a fucking shrink?” you asked me. “Well, do I?” Then you tilted your head and looked down your long, proud nose at me. “You, on the other hand…”

I go outside at night in December, tromping in my boots across packed snow, my breath forming small abstract clouds. I look up to see the stars, a handful of glittering sand flung across the dark. Too many points of light to even begin counting. The sky full of unnameable, silent gods.

The memory comes to me slowly, like a Polaroid developing: first darkness, then lighter shades, then details. The night we went out in late summer, only a few months before you got sick, for the Perseid meteor shower. We laid a blanket out on the grass of your backyard and lay back with our heads turned like empty bowls up to the stars, waiting for the beauty of the universe to fill us. I gasped when I saw the first one, and then the next, and the next—I never stopped gasping as long as the stars arced across the dark and then winked out. Each one a distant burst of magic.

“Like a child,” you said in disdain, as we were picking up the blanket and going back to the house. “You kept going, like—” And here you treated me to an exaggerated intake of air, a hysterical gasp. “Over and over again. Like a fucking child.”

“You could have told me to be quiet if it was bothering you.”

“Yeah, it’s always my fault. Sure. Always my responsibility to teach you how to behave. Like I said—a child.”

My bowl was tipping over, spilling. Empty. All the beauty of the last half hour gone into the grass.

You were right, you know. Since you passed, I’ve been going to therapy. Getting my head shrunken. Shrunken down down down.

Me and your memory, we fall together, into the pit again.

I am a bad widow, because many of my sessions aren’t centered around my grief at losing you. Many of them—too many—are spent discussing old wounds, old arguments, old tantrums. Things I thought I’d forgotten but which come lurching up from under the surface, one by one, the first memory stringing the next one along until I’m facing dozens of old fights. Things I should have gotten over years ago.

I knew I would miss you, but I never thought it would be like this. Not with so much anger and hatred mixed in with the sorrow. But even the anger and hatred, I think, is really grief with a different face. After all, didn’t I sob after our fights? Wasn’t that grief, too? It was sorrow for myself, for us—for the relationship that kept on not working and not working and yet we kept trying like we were trying to demonstrate the definition of insanity—and before I could set you free to find someone else, someone who wouldn’t rub you the wrong way, the way it seemed I always had—you were gone. Vanished into the earth.

Sometimes I think I am a tree and my center is made not of wood but of grief, thin and silver, and if one were to cut away all the outer rings of my tree—the anger, the helplessness, the relief, the love—that thin silver sliver of grief would remain, standing like a frozen river in the air, and if you were to tap it, just gently, it would ring like a bell. I can hear it ringing now. I think I will hear it ringing for the rest of my life.