This Will All Be Over Soon

by Cecily Strong

  Then, slowly, Henry and I start talking again. By January he’s living in the house with Markus, Cindy, and me. I’m so happy to have him back. We cry in each other’s arms about how much we missed each other. I love him so much. I told him about seeing someone else, before we decided to try again. He seemed like a different person. He said he understood.

  “Did you fuck him?” He throws a glass of wine at my wall. It ruins the flamenco poster I have hanging. I got it in Seville. It’s a similar image to the ones his parents had framed in their gorgeous apartment. It’s really the only thing I have in my room. I don’t have much money. I make $9 an hour selling wine at a deli five nights a week. I’m not sure I’m cut out for LA.

  Another night I wake up to Henry crying. He’s on the internet. I think he’s watching porn. He says, “You did that with someone else.” He’s got a knife to his arm. He’s carving letters onto his skin. He says he’s writing “covet nothing.” I think of the letters I traced lightly on his back. I hate how much I’ve hurt him.

  One morning I run out of my door, terrified, to find Henry, who is getting something from his pickup. “I’m pregnant, Henry.”

  I leave Los Angeles after only seven months with all my things piled in Henry’s truck. I’m twenty-three. I’m not pregnant anymore when we leave.

  Not long after we return to Chicago, we split up again. He moves to Northern California to live with his aunt and uncle. His aunt is a really outspoken and funny teacher. His uncle is an arborist and built his own house. He’s Henry’s hero.

  I’m working at a restaurant now called the Pasta Shoppe and living in my old house with my mom. I’m a server. I’m not great at it but I went to art school to be an actor. I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to do. I’m taking classes at the Second City. I recently quit smoking. It’s only been a couple of months since Henry left. This day I am working the Sunday shift, my favorite because it’s a daytime shift and you get to be outdoors and usually there are enough customers to make a decent amount of tips. My cell phone starts buzzing about halfway through. I see that it’s Cindy calling. She leaves a message. I check it on a break.

  “Hey, Cecily, sorry to bug you but I just got a call from a hospital in Palo Alto. They said this was the last number called in a phone for an unidentified person they found after he was hit by a train. I’m not sure what’s happening. Is Henry okay?”

  I run outside after telling my boss I have an emergency. I can’t think straight. I’m panicking. I call Henry. No answer. I call my parents. My dad and stepmom pick me up. They calm me down a little and I call Henry’s mom. I’m so scared. He was hit by a train. His mom answers, “Oh, Cecily.” She’s crying but not sobbing. She says she doesn’t know exactly what happened yet. I ask about head injuries. She says she doesn’t think so. He’s alive, but he’s not awake. They are flying to California tomorrow. Henry’s brother is there now.

  I spend that night smoking again with Henry’s best friend. We decide we should fly to California, too. I don’t have the money, but I use my new credit card to get a ticket on Southwest.

  He’s at Stanford. He’s in an induced coma. They had to amputate his entire left leg. He’s had an operation and his stomach is held together with staples. They are worried about infection. His brother is a doctor. He assures us it’s the best trauma center in the world. Henry will be okay.

  I walk in circles endlessly around the hospital. I’m worried about Henry. I wonder if I should be there. Will he want to see me when he wakes up? I’ve never felt so confused. In a day or two, his dad says they want to bring him out of the coma now. Will I see if I can wake him up? I go into his room. I hold his hand. I try not to look at the awful bandage on his upper thigh, where his leg used to be. It smells like disinfectant, but there is another terrible smell and I think it is his flesh and blood. His long eyelashes flutter as I talk to him. I think he squeezes my hand. He doesn’t wake up though.

  A couple hours later, the nurses say he’s up. He’s out of it though. They decide his brother will be the one who first tells him he lost his leg. I’m allowed in later, with Henry’s best friend. He smiles at me. “Hey. I’m glad you’re here.” I immediately cry. He says, “Come here,” and we hug. And he kisses me. We spend an hour or so that day making light jokes and listening to his music.

  I fly back and forth every couple of weeks while Henry is in the hospital. I max out my credit card. But I need to be there with him. He has this amazing nurse who tells me it’s great that I’m there. He thinks I’m really helping Henry heal. I sleep on chairs next to him. I stroke his hand. He sometimes reaches for me. He’s nicer to me than he’s been in years.

  Later I hear that some of the hospital staff thought he was such a romantic after they went through his journal trying to learn his identity. He had written all about his “girl.” I knew it wasn’t me. I don’t bring it up with him. I can’t think about anything except today.

  I could write more, as there are years of back-and-forth with Henry. But it’s all the same story, just different details. So many memories I keep locked up. We could never end up together and we could never quite let each other go.

  It’s a hard story to tell, you know? I loved him so much, he loved me, maybe part of us always will. But it’s a painful and shameful story, too, and one I can’t share easily because the only responsible “moral” way to think of it means I have to denounce it all. And I tried for years. But I can’t today.

  He visited me once in New York. I tried to be distant and friendly with him and keep things civil. He was nice, not seeming to expect anything physical with me. We talked about his niece. The night before he was going to leave, I woke up in a panic. What was I doing? What if I never saw him again? I went to him asleep on my couch. I crawled next to him and he kissed me again and we were both sort of desperate for one another that night.

  It always ends the same, though, so I don’t see him anymore. I can’t. I am older now. I don’t want love like that, and I know that as a concrete truth. But I’m still glad I had it. I don’t know if it makes me lucky or unlucky. I don’t know if I’m a bad person. I just know that in order to remember the days of tracing letters on his back and feeling so lightheaded because I loved him so much, I have to also remember the cruelty and feeling lower than I ever had. I cannot separate them. And it’s all painful in some way. Part of me worries that someday I will get a call and learn that he’s gone.

  So I leave things with him as two people living on clouds, and every now and then, if our clouds pass by, we can wave.

  There is a person out there who has loved me more than anyone and I’ve loved him more than anyone. But he is just a person out there. And that’s how our story has to end.

  June 3, 2020

  I tried to write a chapter about my first love, the person I was with off and on for seven years, starting at fifteen. I tried hard to figure out how to talk around certain things but still be honest. It’s a huge and heavy part of my life. I tried to include as much of the good as the bad, which is what you do when living in a toxic relationship anyway.

  I think it’s important in knowing who I am and why I have such a tough time with relationships. So I emailed him a copy. Partly because I thought it was sweet in many ways, and partly to make sure he was okay with it, but I wasn’t too worried. I left a lot out and didn’t use his name.

  But he doesn’t want me to talk about it publicly, even with a fake name. “You must realize this will be my entire public presence. I can’t tell you what to do, or what your story is, or how to tell it. But I would never dream of talking about you, your life, or us publicly. Not only because you’ve always guarded your privacy tightly and actively feared that I might reveal things about you. Also because public discourse is dangerous, fragmented and intractable, and I could never control how the slightest detail might be digested and interpreted about you in the storm of public perception.”

  He’s embarrassed about the things he did to me. So I can’t talk about the
m.

  They still happened, though. Even if you don’t talk about it.

  I’m shaken by that interchange. Still shaken today.

  I feel really low about it. I’m confused.

  For years I lived this way. Because I was embarrassed, too.

  I accepted a lot. I’m not proud. But I think the secrecy and shame are part of why you get stuck in really bad places.

  In an abusive relationship.

  So here are empty pages. There should be eleven.

  “Thanks for understanding. Good luck with your project.”

  June 7, 2020

  The world stopped. It stopped for some months, hesitating, not sure what would happen next. When we stopped, every sound made became amplified. And we all heard the sound of a man saying that terrible three-word refrain: “I can’t breathe.” George Floyd was suffocated by three police officers on his body, one with a knee on his neck for almost nine minutes. And then this pause, this space, finally provided room for voices that never seem to get to be heard to say, “ENOUGH!” And it is powerful. But it is just the first step, and there is so much work to do to start fixing all the systems that have enabled oppression of Black Americans for years and years. And anger is rarely patient, you know?

  June 8, 2020

  Dear Jack,

  Can you believe it? I finally got to see you again yesterday! It had been eighty-nine days since I last saw you. Some days I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again. Some days, it was all I could think about. Some days, it was all I wanted.

  It feels almost unreal. Like I’d been granted one wish for a day and I wished to see you again. Or Cinderella with that midnight curfew when it all disappears. And there you were: Taller than I remembered. Longer hair, glasses, new freckles. No more tailored Italian suits from eBay. Dressed down. And standing in my kitchen in the new house in Hudson!

  We went to get wine and I asked you in the car if we had hugged hello. Isn’t that funny? I didn’t remember. I’m so nervous around you still and I think maybe I worry if I touch you, my hand will go through you, breaking the illusion. You’re a bit like my Eurydice this way—and so I’m trying to follow the rules Orpheus couldn’t.

  We have dinner. I’m barely awake, barely here. It isn’t my best showing. I go to bed thinking that I’ve lost you again.

  But in the morning, I get to start over. I’m not so tired anymore. I’m not so scared. We laze away the day playing my card games: Anomia, Monikers. We sit outside and talk about our families and our jobs and each other. I feel I’m on borrowed time with you but I don’t mind, because it’s worth any trade: to lie in the sun with my legs draped over you and we talk the way we used to talk. I like talking to you so much. We are good at that. Not great at plenty of other things, but really good at talking to one another.

  You thank me for putting up with you. I don’t think I put up with you, but I understand feeling that way. I’ve always struggled with dating and relationships. I’ve drawn such a clear picture of why it cannot work that it’s the chalk door in the movie Beetlejuice and it’s a real door now. I keep talking about being a werewolf. I hate how quickly I panic that I am being left. Is today the day? I fill in every blank space with a bad thought, so I desperately beg for answers each time there’s a pause. I have never been sure what to do with my monster. It’s ruined so much. At least that’s what I’ve concluded. It’s been my narrative.

  I read a poem once about demons dancing together: we can love each other because our demons can dance together. I hate that poem. I don’t want to throw a party for my demons and I don’t want my demons to choose who I get to love. And two demons in love is not the relationship I want. I have been there. When I was Sophie and Henry.

  But then there’s you, Jack. And you seem to be able to forgive me without even knowing how precious a gift that is to me. And maybe this is how I handle my demons. You don’t dance with them, they don’t scare you away. You forgive them. You keep talking to me. You’re the one guy who knows you put out an oil fire with baking soda or salt, not water. And so I feel so grateful to you.

  Thanks for putting up with me.

  You left in your grandmother’s old car, a Lexus you call “Sexy Lexy,” just like the name of a show I tried to make years ago. I’ve already drawn that constellation for myself. You say it’s a new chapter. And I like that. New chapter.

  I sat on the steps with Lucy as you drove away, waving your arm out of your window. You’re a person who does that.

  I thought I’d feel so sad when you left. But instead I feel hopeful. The rest of the day Kevin and I giggle about anything and everything. Everything feels like a victory. There’s a Thai restaurant in this town! We figured out Apple TV! The new season of Drag Race All Stars has started! A reservation was canceled, so we get to stay in this home through August! So many wins.

  It’s a new chapter, Jack. Like you said.

  And I’ll see you soon.

  June 14, 2020

  Today is the first day I wonder whether the ending to this story might be happy. And I don’t even want to say it out loud, but wouldn’t it be amazing, after all of these days in isolation trying to find magic and trying to learn how to grieve Owen and grieve Hal and just plain grieve; after all these days with nothing to take up the space around me, leaving room for all the ghosts from my life to stop by for a while, making it so I’d have to look at them; after all these days of rain where I looked for any sunshine because it’s what Owen would have done—if maybe I get a happy ending? I have Kevin, I have Lucy, and now I have Jack again. And it’s the least alone I’ve felt in a long time.

  I’m still so sad, and I cried in the car today listening to “Perfect Day.” I just wanted to listen because it’s a song I love. It was my song once, but now I see it has to belong to Hal for a while. Maybe forever. And that grief is attached to the heaviest fucking anchor of COVID and quarantine and police brutality and those awful two weeks in my apartment and that awful week in January. They are all mashed together now, I think. And all of it could easily swallow me someday. But I’m alive. I’m living with it. I am living without Owen and living with everything that means.

  So I suppose I could say my happy ending is relative.

  But then I can see Owen so clearly, and he would say. “Fuck that, Cec. It’s a happy ending!”

  And so that’s what it will be.

  June 21, 2020

  This year started with one of the hardest weeks of my life. And I’m just one of many who are still trying to understand how to live with the colossal loss of one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met in my life, who happens to be my cousin as well. Owen. My dad’s only nephew, who shared his passion for music.

  My dad was the one who called me and told me what was happening with my amazing cousin that day, and we cried together on the phone. We spoke side by side at the service. I don’t know if I ever remember wanting a hug from my dad so much since I was a little kid and my mom would threaten, “Wait till Dad finds out,” but I knew it was an empty threat because nine times out of ten my dad would just give me a huge hug instead of some imaginary admonishment, because we were best friends.

  We lost our way a bit in the middle, but we made it back to here. I wait for one very important text after every live show on Saturday: my dad’s summary, always far too complimentary of me. I am sorry for the year, and I miss you, Dad. But I’m so thankful for my first best friend who took me on trips to New York often, just the two of us, to see the Broadway shows Uncle Ed produced, because that’s what I wanted to do, too! And every time I also got to spend time with my funny little cousins and my funny grandma with the Southern accent and Jackie O hair who called me Lulu and told me my favorite stories as a kid. Like when her sister Jessie fell in a port-o-potty. Or when her brother Alan—nicknamed Pooh—wanted to be a dog playing dress-up with her as kids but she wanted him to be a ballerina and she’s the oldest, so there was a picture of Pooh in a tutu chained to a doghouse.

  I love you s
o much, Dad. It isn’t easy to say “happy” Father’s Day this year, but I know how happy I am that you are my father.

  Happy Father’s Day to the person I needed to lean on at Owen’s service. Happy Father’s Day to the big hug I needed most that day we all met to say goodbye and celebrate our boy who loved birds. The big hug that I needed most as a little girl crying in my bedroom because I’d gotten in trouble. My dad.

  June 22, 2020

  I sent my dad that Father’s Day bit and he texted me late last night:

  What a Father’s Day gift! What a gift, period! Your words mean so, so much to me, girlie. Too momentous to set off tears (at least on first reading). It just made me reflect on how lucky I am to have you in my life and share truth, love, and laughter with you.

  We were always best friends and will be forever. We made it through the rough passage of divorce to this place. It’s a really good place, even if we don’t get to see each other much.

  July 7, 2020

  I want to tell you about one of the most important and special people in my life: my little sister Rashida.

  She’s not biologically my little sister. She’s the little sister the universe gave me.

  I met her through friends in Chicago. I saw her Facebook and saw this fired-up activist who mentored kids and was a superhero about helping the world become a better place—but who was also hilarious and silly and one of those people (like my brother) who can’t help but start to smile when they talk to you no matter what they are saying. The ones who have a hard time lying because their faces immediately give them away. Probably not great poker players.