by LJ Evans
Red
“Losing him was blue, like I’d never known,
Missing him was dark gray, all alone.”
- Taylor Swift
I know that Miss Swift didn’t mean this country song to be like this. To be about the loss of someone who had died. But it was true. Loving you had been a race that I’d been determined to win. It had been passionate and free. Free like me diving from the high board. It had been all my colors. All my memories. But…the only regret I had…was when I let you stop loving me and touching me. Letting you walk away to college without the “I love you” meaning forever. Right then. And for all our time. Remembering you was never in flashbacks. It was right in front of me. Hard, painful memories that would make me laugh and cry all at the same time. Only Red.
Remember when you and Wynn and my parents were all worried when I broke up with Matt? You were watching like I’d fall to pieces or something. And now, I was falling to pieces and I had no one to watch out for me. That’s not fair. It’s not true. It was just that I didn’t have you to watch out for me. I still had Mama, Papa, and Wynn. She’d gone back to school in Nashville. But she was texting and calling almost every day. She told me that when I was ready, she wanted me to come up there to school with her. See. Good friend. She’d always been. Even when I hadn’t deserved it.
But the truth was, I didn’t think I’d ever be ready to go anywhere again. I couldn’t be. The one thing I had been born for was gone. So, nothing really mattered anymore. Because that had been all that mattered. I’d never wanted anything else for myself, remember? You’d been my only wish. My only dream come true.
Everyone was on a suicide watch. I mean, they didn’t tell me that. But I knew it. I didn’t have anything to live for anymore. But even though they were worried I’d take my own life, I actually didn’t have enough energy to come up with a plan. Or maybe I was afraid that if I did, when I got to the other side of whatever is out there after death, that you’d be mad as hell at me with those lake-colored eyes. And thinking about you just made more tears come.
Coach came to see me and told me the kids at the dive school were looking for me. But he was so choked up when he said it, when he looked at me, that I wanted to hit him. I didn’t. You’d be proud of me. I didn’t. Instead, I just acknowledged him without committing to anything. But truthfully, I wasn’t moving anywhere. I was in dead stop mode. I had on a sweatshirt of yours that I never wanted to get out of. I’d go into your room… our room… and just lie there crying and trying to get the scent of you, pretending that I could still feel you in the bed with me.
For a couple weeks, I took to living in our room. I’d emerge once in a while because my body was demanding the bathroom, but that was about it. Marina or my mama would leave something on the bedside table for me to eat, but I didn’t care for any of it. Which is saying a lot because you know I’d always been a horse. Able to keep up with all of you boys. They tried to get me to shower and do normal things. But I felt like if I lost the scent of you, it would be like there was nothing left. Even though I was in our room so much, I was barely sleeping. I couldn’t sleep. I missed your body and warmth. I missed the weight of your arm around me. I missed your breath on my face, and your mosaic eyes looking into mine. I was in agony. In a pain I didn’t know how to surmount.
One day, several weeks after the funeral, Marina came in and lay down next to me on your bed. I was curled up in a fetal position. Crying. I couldn’t stop crying. I’d gone from being the tomboy who never cried to that drama girl who never stopped. I hated it. I knew you would hate it, but I still couldn’t stop. It seemed like whenever I’d cried in my life, it had always been over you. Only you.
Your mama was crying too. “Cami.”
Her voice was deep with emotions and tears, and I could just catch a hint of you in it even though she was a woman. “Cami, he wouldn’t want to see you like this. It would break his heart. He’d be beating something to a pulp trying to get you out of here. He’d drag you down the stairs and throw you into the lake himself.”
I knew she was right. I knew you would be so pissed at me for acting like this. For coming to a complete stop. For not living a life that you’d want me to live just like you’d wanted me to have a full high school experience. But I couldn’t go on without you. I didn’t know how to go on without you. Since I was born, I’d been looking for your eyes on me. Later, for your touch on me. I didn’t know what to do without those things. Without the prospect that someday you’d be there looking at me again.
“I know,” I sniffled so that she didn’t think I was ignoring her, which was my normal protocol when anyone tried to talk to me about you. About what you’d want for me.
“Live your life for him.”
“I was,” my voice cracked as I said it, and she put her arm around me. It wasn’t you. But it was in your room. Our room. And it was as close as I was ever going to get to you again.
♫ ♫ ♫
After that, they made me go see a shrink. A “therapist” who helped people with grief and traumatic experiences. So, for the first time in a while, I showered, but I put on another of your shirts that still had your scent. The smells were fading faster than a summer sunset, but I was keeping them as close to me as I could.
The shrink asked me how long I’d been with you. I told her twenty years. She looked puzzled, as I was only twenty. See. It’s just hard to explain to someone who hadn’t known our story. That’s what I told her. That she couldn’t understand our story.
So, she told me to write it down. To write it all down. That maybe somehow it would help me both be with you and to get on without you.
♫ ♫ ♫
So…that’s what I did. I wrote this story for you. Yet another thing I’ve done in my life for you. She says it’s not for you whenever I tell her that. She says it’s for me. But I don’t see that. I want you to know out there wherever you are that this is still about you. Nothing in my life can be about anything else but you. Right?
♫ ♫ ♫
That fake smile I’d learned when you left me to go to college became handy again. I knew that if I didn’t do something soon, somebody would commit me to an insane asylum. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad because then nobody would interrupt my thinking about you.
♫ ♫ ♫
I rode my bike to the lake the other day. Passed the Quick Stop, and it made me think of that day I’d started my period and you’d found Brittney. I rode to the lake and threw my bike under our tree and lay down looking up at its branches reaching toward the sky like I imagined I was reaching out for you even now.
Sometime in those last few months, when we’d gone down there and you’d had to stay on the beach while I swam, you’d carved our names in the trunk. I’d never noticed it till now. It was a big heart with Jake and Cami. Not Cam. Cami. It made me smile weakly and also want to cry, but I was fighting the tears these last few days. Trying hard to choke them back in.
I stared out at the other side of the lake and the cliff. I marched around the lake, dug my fingers and my bare toes into the earth and reached the top. I stared down into the water from the edge. I remembered how angry you’d been the first time I’d jumped. Could almost feel you shaking me and bruising my skinny arms. I also remembered how irate you were the second time, when Seth had pushed me, and I stopped talking to you, and you came to find me and picked me up when Seth hit me. And I thought about how furious you’d be out there wherever you were if I jumped again.
Then I thought, “Good!” Maybe you deserved to be pissed off. I was pissed off. I’d broken one promise to you in my whole goddamn life. One measly damn promise. And I was so very angry that you’d broken the biggest promise you could have made to me. You’d promised me we wouldn’t be apart again. And you hadn’t kept that promise.
Across the way, there were some kids partying. I flashed back to thoughts of Wade and Blake. Later you and Amber. Later you and me. I remembered the thrill of the water
and racing you to the dock. And instead of jumping, I climbed down, and raced your memory to the dock, and pulled myself up, tired and breathing hard. I was out of shape from weeks of inactivity. I tried to warm up in the weak spring air that was threatening to bring on summer. A summer I didn’t think I could do without you. Summer had always been some of our best times.
♫ ♫ ♫
What else do I say? It was a tough time. Those words seem so trivial. So understated, but I’m not sure I could find another word to explain it. Hell? Maybe. Living hell? Closer. There were times where I just wanted it to end because I kind of figured we’d be together again that way. There were times that I knew you’d kick my butt all the way to the lake and back if I didn’t get going. But I was stuck. You’d always been my path out, and I couldn’t see those eyes leading me anymore.
♫ ♫ ♫
My therapist said I needed to move out of our room. That it was holding me back. When I refused, Marina and Scott had my mama take my things out and bolted the door shut. I just gave them all the evil eye, went out to the garage, grabbed a screwdriver and a hammer, and headed back up the stairs. All four of them, my parents and yours, stood in front of the door.
“I’m not going to let you keep me from him.”
My mama was crying. “We’re not, honey. He’s gone. We want to keep you from becoming him.”
I lifted the hammer and tried to shove her out of my way. My daddy got as furious as I’d ever seen him get. He tossed me over his shoulder like you used to, threw me into the shower, and turned on the cold water. It was so something that you would have done that I was stunned.
I looked up at him with a tear-stained face. “That was for Jake,” he said.
Then he stomped out of the bathroom.
I lay there for a long time. Under the cold, cold water. No one came to turn it off. No one came to save me. The only person who would have, was gone. And truth be told, you would have left me there for a long time before you came in to get me. But you would have. You would have brought me towels to wrap up in and hugged me and made it all better by just letting me breathe that scent of you. That chocolate cookie, grassy, boy scent of you that I could hardly smell anymore.
Eventually, my teeth were chattering so hard I had to climb out. I wrapped some towels around me, kicked off my soggy shoes, and went to stare at the bolted door. No one was there blocking my way anymore. I could have unscrewed the bolts and gone in.
I stared at it for a long time, fighting my inner self.
Then I marched down the steps, across our yard, into my old house, and climbed the stairs to my old bed. The bed I hadn’t slept in, in almost two years.
But now I did sleep.
I slept for a long, long time. Longer than I had since you’d gone, because for all those weeks, I’d still been waking up every hour or so reaching out for you in an empty bed.
♫ ♫ ♫
When I woke up, I continued to work on this story for you. But I finally knew my therapist was right. It was also for me.
A Place in This World
“I'm alone, on my own, and that's all I know.
I'll be strong, I'll be wrong, oh but life goes on.”
- Swift, Orrall, Angelo
I listened to this song for a long time the other day. On repeat. Because I was heading down a path with no direction. An airplane on autopilot. I couldn’t see through the tears. The grief. I hadn’t known what I wanted before you died. I really didn’t know what I wanted now that you were gone. I was alone in the world. I know you’d yell at me and say I wasn’t. I know my family would protest. That includes your family… my family… our family. So, what did I do? I let Wynn force me into a direction, a path. It wasn’t one I chose, but it was movement.
In the fall, I joined Wynn at Tennessee State. It was far away from the memories of you. It was some place that you and I had never gone or done things. But the best part of it was that it was a place where I could go through the motions of living without anyone overanalyzing it like both our parents and my therapist had done for months.
Wynn had joined a sorority her freshman year, and was living in the sorority house to which I was granted access because of my sob story. There was no hazing. No rush week. I guess they felt like I’d already been through enough. Or maybe they felt like my tragic love story was good drama. Gave them points in the sorority race to be the best. You and I would have laughed at it just like we did all the ABC tween dramas.
Regardless, I had a room with Wynn, and she kept me going. She always had a list of things for us to do. Football games were off limits, obviously. But there were plenty of other sports to go to and watch muscled boys that she would flirt with mercilessly. She wanted me to go swimming at the pool and maybe start diving again, but I didn’t have any desire to swim anymore. Or dive anymore. I didn’t have anyone to show off for. I didn’t want the adrenaline rush anymore. After that one swim at the lake, when I’d pulled myself back from the cliff, I hadn’t been swimming since. It was gone. I’d left it at the docks. It was my past. Just like you.
I had classes. I honestly don’t know what they were or how I passed them. Do they have some non-stated rule about not failing someone who’d just watched the love of their life die before their eyes? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but somehow, I passed. Not with As, but I passed. I was still undeclared because I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Hell, I could barely get through each day at a time. The rest of my life seemed impossible. But as Mama pointed out whenever she texted me, at least I was going through the motions.
I had some boys flirt with me in a class or two. But they were repulsed with a glare that would have only made you laugh. It was kind of funny. And inside, that made me smile. Knowing that you would have laughed at my glare while they were scared away. That you would have simply pushed my shoulder and started a wrestling match that I wouldn’t have been able to stop from smiling at.
Slowly, the fake smiles would sometimes turn into real smiles when someone made me laugh. Wynn or Mia. Beautiful Mia who had graduated and moved to UTK and would send me goofy videos from all over the school with “Jake was here” signs. They were funny in a bittersweet way. She’d grin and wink, your wink, and it broke my heart but made me smile too. No one would really ever talk to me about you. They were afraid I’d break. Or maybe I was afraid I’d break, and they sensed that, but Mia felt somehow safe enough to text me something about you or send me those pictures, but she’d never say anything about you in person. Not to me.
Sometimes, when I’d smile, I’d feel guilty. Like a real smile was somehow betraying you. But then I realized, it was just betraying my loss of you. I know that you certainly wouldn’t have wanted me to stop laughing or smiling or living. I knew that. And I was trying. Trying to find my old self or some semblance of it, if only because I knew that that was what you’d want. There were moments, when I thought I couldn’t do it, that I’d shout up at you, “God, Jake, I’m trying, okay?” Wishing for a sign that you’d heard.
But the deep-down truth was that I just didn’t want to be happy without you. I didn’t want anything without you. I wasn’t anything without you.
♫ ♫ ♫
I don’t know how long one can write about the same thing. The misery, the unhappiness. The going through the motions so the people who love you will think that you are okay. But I think that’s how I survived that first year in Nashville.
That first year without you was the worst. Then, the fog started to clear just a little. I didn’t always feel like I was under a rain cloud. I started looking about me for something to hook onto, to get myself involved in, hoping that it would pull me back to life.
Coach Daniels knew some folks with dive schools in and around Nashville, and he said he’d make a few calls for me if I wanted to go back to coaching kids, but the truth was that diving was still too painful. It still reminded me of you too much. I didn’t think I’d ever be
able to do that again.
Wynn and I got our own apartment. She was almost finished with school, whereas I was a couple years behind her. I’d lost a lot of time. She was getting her nursing degree and wanted to work in an OB ward, or preferably, a neo-natal ward. She was interning at Vanderbilt University Hospital. She wasn’t working with patients yet, but was working on the administrative side, checking in patients, that kind of stuff. One day, she asked if I wanted to tag along just to see if anything piqued my interest because she knew I was still floundering around for a direction.
I went with her. She left me to go to work, and I wandered around the hospital a bit. I came across a sign that said “Diabetes Support Group.” I don’t know why I did it, but I ended up following the arrows, and coming upon a conference room with a small group of people of all ages sitting around a table.
I stopped at the door. A pretty, dark-haired woman, obviously the leader of the group, in a pencil skirt and glasses, asked if I was looking for the diabetes group and would I like to join them? I certainly didn’t have diabetes. But I wanted to join them. And I did.
For the first few minutes, everyone was just introducing themselves and talking about whether they’d been newly diagnosed or had been living with diabetes for a while. They were talking about the lifestyle change and how it was impacting them positively and negatively. I just sat there for a long time. Quiet. Listening.
Finally, the leader turned to me and asked if I’d like to introduce myself and share my story.
I froze for a second. It wasn’t my story. It was your story. Our story. But then I started. I told them my name, and I told them about you. I told them how mad I was at you and myself for not forcing you to get your condition diagnosed earlier and to take care of yourself sooner. How mad I was that you and I had both let a game come between you and your health. I blamed myself. If I’d thrown a fit, you would have done something earlier, for me, right?… Maybe.