“I love you, I love you, I miss you so much!” you whispered, then jumped up and ran back out of the room, still weeping. When I tried to follow you I discovered the door was locked. It wouldn’t open no matter how hard I tried.
When I woke up, my cheeks were wet.
I miss you so Goddamn much.
Most things in the house are exactly as you left them. I never redecorated, got new furniture, or painted the walls. Every framed picture you hung is still in the same spot, even the Rothko print over the sofa. I never told you I don’t like it, and yet there it hangs a decade later. Leaving things the way you left them feels like you’re still here in a small way.
The Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet comes to mind frequently, the one that begins “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied” and ends with
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!
You’re not the only woman I’ve loved in my life. There were a few before you, and now there’s one after you, but you and I loved each other when we were the strongest and healthiest we would ever be, and we had (we believed) the best parts of our life ahead of us. We had energy, we made time for sex, we were excited about the future. The times I loved women before you seemed even then like dress rehearsals.
Before you left me, we used to reminisce about our first dates and our wedding and honeymoon, and all the sexual escapades we had. Now I rarely let myself remember those times. If I were a better man, I’d find a way to salvage the good memories despite how things ended. But the bitterness of your leaving sometimes outweighs the sweetness we had. I wish I knew how to change that, because we had some wonderful times I hate to forget.
It’s funny, the things I’ve already forgotten. I remember our first kiss—but not our second. I remember the first time we made love—but not the first time you had a climax. Was it during sex? Or during foreplay before we had sex?
I remember when you first told me you love me—but I don’t remember the last time you told me.
Friends of mine—I guess I should say late friends of mine—used to tell me I could take solace in being reunited with you in heaven. And though I didn’t argue with them, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe in grand reunions on the other side. If there is an other side, a beautiful paradise with no sorrow, why would we waste time waiting to welcome our friends and spouses and children and parents to show up? Paying attention to our former existence? It would be as if an adult dragonfly focused its attention on the life it lived as a larvae.
Maybe life as we know it is briefly center stage, but ultimately unimportant. Like extras in a movie. To the extras, their scenes are the scenes of the movie, but nobody else hardly notices them. They’re just part of the scenary.
It would be quite comforting to believe one day I’ll look into your eyes again, hold your hand again, kiss your lips again. But I’m afraid to believe it. It hurts too much to believe it’s true, and it hurts more to believe it’s not true.
There are times when I’m able to believe there truly is life after death, that you ascend to Paradise after death. Times when I picture you waking up in that new existence, or traveling down a tunnel toward the light of the new existence. I picture you waking up to a body made whole, a perfect body, with no flaws and no disease and no age. It’s still one-hundred percent Tammy, but a Tammy with a perfect body. Perfect teeth, perfect skin, perfect laugh. Quite unlike the last Tammy body I saw, a body eaten alive by cancer and ravaged by chemotherapy. And I imagine you discovering your new body, and how you’d respond. I picture you running and jumping and reveling in your strength and agility, delighted at what your body can do. I imagine you happy in that new life, freed from the diseased body you were shackled to, and my joy for you is so great it causes me to weep. I wouldn’t want you to turn back and focus on me, living here in this existence you just graduated from. Stop looking at this dingy old life here and go live your new life with your new perfect body and shining sun and amber waves of grain. And then I spend fifteen minutes or so struggling not to cry, because I miss you so much and wish so badly we were together somehow, and usually end up reaching for the bottle of bourbon.
The day of your funeral, before they closed the casket, I leaned over and kissed your lips. They were cold, they were lifeless, but they were your lips, never to touch my lips again, and so I kissed them one last time forever.
There’s never a second chance to do the things we could and should have done. We only get one chance to be the person we want to be, to do the things we long to do, one chance to love someone the way they deserve, one chance to be worthy of their love in return. My chance with you is over. Any impact I had on your life is a thing of the past. Your impact lingers on, as you still make a difference in my life.
After you left, my wedding ring burned my finger like fire. I developed a rash. Eventually I took it off and put it in a small box in my dresser, under the photo of us on our wedding day. At some point I put it back on, but I don’t remember when or why.
I know it’s stupid, and I know it’s wrong, but I’m royally pissed at you for leaving. I know it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything to cause your sickness, you didn’t give up. You fought hard. But you lost.
So even though it makes no sense, there have been nights, often but not always alcohol-induced, when I was so fucking angry with you I had to turn your framed photo face down. Seeing you looking at me, smiling so beautifully, so young and healthy . . . it angered me. I start to wish I’d never met you and so was never hurt by you. How I felt reminds me of part of a Carl Sandburg poem:
I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish you never quit your job and came along with me.
I wish we never bought a license and a white dress
My love for you, my anger and pain at your leaving, is causing me problems now. I was thrown together with a woman named Michelle, and we hit it off and are now living together by circumstance and by choice. But I don’t trust her never to leave me. I don’t trust her not to hurt me. And I’ve started suspecting her of loving someone else, even though there is no one else alive. Intellectually I know she can’t be in love with someone else, yet my heart remains unconvinced.
What would have happened if Jason hadn’t died? Would you still have left? Did his dying make you sick? Or were you already a ticking time-bomb, and the cancer would have slow-motion detonated inside you anyhow? If he hadn’t died, would we have raised him together? Or would something bad have happened? Would we have stayed married or gotten divorced? Would one of us cheated on the other? Would we have gotten tired of each other?
In my heart, I believe we would have weathered any storm—and we would have had our share. Financial, physical, spiritual—there would have been rough patches, of course. There would have been dark days and high and mighty days. Days of wine and roses and days of stale bread and sour milk.
But even if Jason hadn’t died, we might not have made it. We know, or rather we knew more couples who didn’t make it than couples who did. You can love each other with a consuming love, and it might not be enough. The Beatles said “All You Need is Love” and then they broke up.
There have been a few nights steeped in bourbon when I agonized over what may have happened and why. Knowing we could have drifted apart even if you survived your cancer begged the question: what would have caused it? A weakness in my character? A flaw in yours? Which of us was more likely to struggle with fidelity? A few times I fell asleep filled with remorse, suspecting in our alternate universe I’d betrayed you, and equally hurt to think it may have been you who betrayed me. Those nights usually preceded mornings filled with a less emotional and more physical remorse at the amount of bourbon I’d consumed.
Despite what I said earlier about not believing in grand reunions, I believe in something probably just as—if
not more—ludicrous. I choose to believe that somehow, somewhere there is a version of reality where Jason didn’t die and you and I stayed in love until the day we died together of old age. My belief in such a universe comforts me. Somewhere you are still alive, Jason is now a happy grown man, and we’re looking forward to retirement with each other and with nary a thought of cancer or the undead.
But in the meantime, what do I do about Michelle? Who can blame her for getting upset when I accuse her of something she didn’t do, when I try to catch her doing things I know she isn’t doing.
I love Michelle, I really do. But my love for her is not the same as my love for you. There’s no innocence, no faith in the future, no complete and utter willingness to face whatever happens. I’m just too scared, Tammy. I don’t have it in me.
I wonder what advice you would give me now? I used to love how you responded when I asked you for serious advice. You were thoughtful and sensitive and gave intelligent counsel. I had a dream a few months ago where you told me to give her the stars. At first I thought you wanted me to paint stars on the ceiling, but later I thought perhaps the stars were more like actions I could do to create pinpricks of light in the darkness of her trials, allowing light to stream in like God-rays. In his song Lovers in a Dangerous Time Bruce Cockburn sang “gotta kick at the darkness ‘till it bleeds daylight.” Maybe you meant for me to break up her dark times with little spots of light. Lord knows we’re lovers in a dangerous time.
You know I don’t believe in time travel. If time travel ever became possible, we’d know it now because we’d have time-traveling tourists from the future coming to watch important historical events. Having no visitors from the future proves time travel will never happen. But if time travel did exist, if we could revisit our younger selves, I would travel back in time to give you one more kiss, hold your hand one more time, spend another hour with you, or another day, or week, or year. Just to lay my eyes on you one more time, to hear your laugh, to hear you cry, to hear your sighs of passion. And when our kiss, our hour, was over I think I’d choose to end everything. I’ve heard the secret to a long life is knowing when it’s time to go. Maybe I should have left when you did.
So there you have it, Tammy. I know you’re never coming back. I know I’ll never hear your laugh, or feel your hand in mine, never even get the chance to irritate you by leaving all the cabinet doors open after I’ve been cooking. You’re never coming back, and I can’t bring myself to spend time remembering the time we had together. It just hurts too damn much.
I miss you so much. I think it’s time I got drunk. Or drunker.
All my love forever,
Kevin
January 9th
Last night I couldn't sleep. Sometimes wine messes up my sleep and gives me strange dreams. I dreamt about Tammy. Again. When I woke up, I couldn’t go back to sleep. I got out of bed, fixed a glass of bourbon, and wrote her a letter.
When I was finished, I was pretty upset. So I refilled my glass of bourbon and went upstairs. I peeked out the window. It was a gorgeous night. Several inches of fresh snow had fallen, and there was a full moon. I checked the thermometer and saw it was in the upper twenties—cold enough to slow the zombies down, but not cold enough to render them harmless.
I hadn't bothered to put any clothes on, and it probably wasn't the brightest thing to do (I blame the bourbon), but I decided to go outside. I put on a pair of shoes I keep by the side door, checked the peep hole, threw back the bolt and stepped outside.
As I looked to my right, toward the road, I saw five deer ghosting through the neighbor's yard across the street. The light reflected off their flanks, and their shadows were cast to the east. I must have made a little bit of noise, because suddenly they all looked at me, ears up, and then bolted away, between houses and out of sight. I walked through the crunchy snow to the corner of the house by the back yard.
The landscape was silvery and luminous. The half-moon was already in the west, and shadows were cast on the virginal snow. There was no wind, no noise, no lights. Despite the moon, I could clearly see stars, especially in the north and east. The moon itself was so brilliant it almost hurt my eyes. I heard a couple of owls hooting somewhere in the near distance. In the snow I could see tracks of animals—deer, rabbits, mice, birds. A mile or so away I heard the high call of a coyote.
The snow softened the shapes of everything, making the landscape look like a Christmas card. Only the footprints of small animals and deer broke the surface of the virginal snow. I haven’t seen any bear tracks yet, but I’ll bet I will in time.
I stood there, naked, my willy shrinking up, caught up in my emotions and the mystery of the moment. My left hand held the glass of bourbon; my right hand migrated to my willy and covered it for warmth.
The trees in the neighbor’s back yard had a layer of snow on the branches. The roof of Michelle's house across from me practically glowed. The fence between our houses also had several inches of snow on top, and the fence cast a blue-black shadow on the ground.
Because of my dream, my thoughts at first were still about Tammy, but soon I began thinking about the snow, and how in a few months it will all be gone. I thought about the transient nature of things, and I began to think how things would never be like this again.
At some point in the future, I will die, or Michelle will die, and the other one will be left to carry on. I can't imagine how I would live without Michelle. She's my lifeline, my sanity, my only friend (except for Doc). I can't imagine leaving her alone to fend for herself.
I thought, too, about life after we're gone. Once I'm gone, there will be no one left to remember Jason. It will be as if he never existed. And once Michelle's gone, there will be no one to remember me. The story of my life will be unwritten.
I thought about my grandparents, and their grandparents before them. I don't even know what my great grandparents’ names were. They are gone forever, even their names forgotten. In this world we live in, I suppose nearly every former living person is now forgotten forever. Whatever dastardly deeds they did in their lifetime, no matter what heroic feats were accomplished during the Collapse—all of it is forgotten.
I took another sip of bourbon, and then watched, fascinated, as a great horned owl flew over my head and landed in the neighbor's tree. It didn't make a sound, the flight completely silent. I saw a small cascade of snow silently fall from the branch on which it landed. With the moonlight shining on it, it sparkled like star dust as it floated down.
After a few minutes it took flight. Without even a breath of sound it lifted off and flew over to the fence between our houses. I stood still, admiring its shape in the moonlight. It was perhaps twenty feet from me. The moon in the west highlighted its wings. It perched there, head swiveling around, as it surveyed the yard and probably looked for a meal. At one point it looked right at me, watching.
After a few minutes, it moved on, north and out of sight. I stood there, shivering, again thinking about the temporal nature of things. When I die, there will be no one to remember the owl. And one day Michelle will be without me, or I will be without her. My eyes began to tear up, and I chided myself for it.
I've never experienced a love like this. It's vital to me now. My love with Tammy was just as intense, but it was completely different; they’re different people and these are different times. How could I manage to go on if Michelle died? Even the thought make me sad. I don’t know if I could survive such a loss again.
From somewhere to the east, I heard the owl hoo-h’hoo-hoo-hoo, then heard the mate answer from farther away, her pitch a bit higher.
We may very well look back on this time as the best years of our lives post-Collapse. I resolve to live more in the moment, to notice more about Michelle, to express my love to her more, to do what I can to make her life better. When I make her my focal point, all is right with the world. When I start to think about me, and whether she's making the same amount of effort to love me—in other words, when I become self-concerned
—that's when things deteriorate. Suddenly it's not unconditional love.
I want to die knowing I loved her with all my heart, strength, and mind, whether she goes first or I do.
I thought, This time will soon pass away, and I'll wish with all my might for just one more day with her, like I do with Tammy. But my wish will not be granted. The very thought filled me with melancholy.
But as I lifted the glass to my lips and sipped the last of the bourbon, I heard the owls call again. And I thought, Yeah, it will happen. But right now, your lover sleeps peacefully no more than thirty or forty feet from where you stand. I turned to my right and took a quick piss, watching the steam rise from the darkening snow.
With a sense of urgent joy overflowing my heart, I crunched my way back to the side door, went back downstairs and opened the laptop to write down these thoughts. Soon I will slip into bed beside her. And though I’d like to press my body against hers, to feel her skin, to nuzzle her neck, after having been outside my cold hands and feet will probably awaken her. So I imagine I will lie there, listening to her breathe slowly in and out, and just like the calls of the owls outside, my breath will soon began to answer hers as I drift to sleep.
February 1st
Not much to report over the past few weeks. We’ve gotten into a groove and a pretty good routine. We actually have a schedule.
Monday: Spend time on the plants (check the pH, replenish the water, add fertilizer, harvest, replant, check for pests, clean up). Germinate seeds. Check in with Doc.
Tuesday: Seek and destroy (eliminate any new zombies who have wandered into the neighborhood). Haul off a couple of bodies.
Wednesday: Check neighborhood houses for zombies/survivors. Destroy zombies. Haul a few more bodies. Rescue survivors (if we ever find any). Check in with Doc.
My Zombie Honeymoon: Love in the Age of Zombies Book One Page 25