by Gray, Ace
I only know that it was going to happen sooner or later. I was headed for Tanner 2.0, and I had to take the steps to prevent that, to preserve my sanity. No matter how bad it hurts. Regardless of how much better this is in the long run.
My feet are numb against the carpet, my joints creak as I stand. The shadow of Mina follows me as I move slowly around the house. Her absence is just as noticeable as she always was, if not more so. There’s a light missing.
There’s a piece of me missing.
Every part of Pyramid Peak reminds me of her. As I walk to work, there’s the street where we fought, where we kissed. Her restaurant. The alley where she held me after… I don’t want to think about it. About any of it. Certainly not losing the best friend I’ve ever had. Because she was more than Eddy was and that realization and its guilt is enough that I have to sit on the closest bench and catch my breath. I leave a wake of loss behind me.
Why?
With a sigh, I force myself to accept that I’m just not going to be happy. Maybe because I hate to show it, I’m rewarded with it not having to.
Everything echoes like boulders crashing into a canyon in the brewhouse. Even flipping on the fluorescent lights, which then proceed to buzz and hum at an ungodly volume. I can feel them in my teeth. The entire world is loud without Mina to soften it. Each of my movements seem to rattle my whole skeleton.
I need to sleep but that evades me too.
“Holy shit, what happened to you?” Jonas asks when he finally steps foot inside the brewhouse.
I look around first and check my hands second, inspecting for an injury. I’m numb enough that I wouldn’t notice.
“No, you look like hell, James.”
I can’t remember the last time I looked in a mirror. I’m not even sure if I brushed my teeth this morning. I definitely didn’t pull one through my hair.
“Whatever do you mean?” I ask.
“Nice try, James. I know you’re not chatty but you kinda look like you went on a bender. As your boss, I have to make sure you’re fit to be in here with heavy machinery.” He puts his hands on his hips and schools his face into serious lines that don’t really suit his usual golden retriever demeanor.
I don’t want to say it out loud. That’ll make it real.
“James, in all seriousness. You have bruises under your eyes. I don’t think that’s your hair so much as a damn rat’s nest and you haven’t stopped clenching your jaw or your fists since I walked in. What the fuck dude?”
“She’s gone, okay?” I yell even though I don’t mean to and the words tear through my chest just the same as my throat. I know I’m busted up and bleeding onto the floor. “Mina and I aren’t together,” I add in a whisper as if the first set of words shredded my throat the way they shredded my soul. “And I don’t want to talk about it.” The tears pricking the corners of my eyes should say enough.
“She left you?” Jonas’ tone quiets like he’s approaching a cornered, wounded animal.
I can’t bring myself to say no. I can’t bring myself to admit the truth. Jonas seems to read it all the same.
“What did you do?” he asks.
“What I had to,” I mutter, hiding my face from him. Hiding the pain. “We were going down in flames, I was just trying to keep both of us from getting burned.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wasn’t kidding when I said I don’t want to talk about it.” I pick up a few clamps and a hose to go back to work.
“I think you need to. Or at the very least, Pyramid Peak is small enough that you’re gonna have to.”
“Not if I leave.”
The words hit my stomach like rocks falling into a lake even as I say them. They ripple out, making my hands shake and I have to ball them before I keep working. Leave. It’s so final. It means never seeing Mina again, which is everything I need and nothing that I want.
“Are you putting in your notice?” Jonas shifts seamlessly from friend to boss.
And I think about it, but I can’t. Not yet. I wanted to start a life here for more reasons than Mina. She just became everything so quickly I didn’t have a chance.
“No,” I say with finality as I go back to work.
“James…” He sighs. “I’m just going to say this one thing, because we’re friends, then I’ll never say anything about any of it again.”
He takes a deep breath and I know he’s waiting for me to protest. But I don’t. I don’t have the strength today.
“We all make mistakes but loving someone isn’t one of them. No one has a guarantee any of it’ll work out but risking it on love is worth it. Every time.” He clears his throat. “I don’t have any guarantee that it’ll work out with Aspen. I didn’t then and I don’t now, the passage of time doesn’t make it any more certain.”
I nod but I don’t look at him. I can’t let myself take his words in.
“We have to choose each other every day. We have to risk it every day.”
“But you know the odds are good.” I shoot him a halfhearted smile that falls a moment later.
“They’re just odds.” He shrugs. “Defy them. Bet against them. Change them.”
I sit and stare at my beer more than drink it. The small bubbles renewing in the glass, making those small spindly strands up from the bottom of glass. The color crisp and caramel. I recognize it as the flecks of Mina’s eyes closest to her irises.
When I take a sip, the taste is so far from I want it to be I almost spit it out. It tastes like Mina is missing.
“James?”
I close my eyes when I hear that voice.
“Courtney, not today. Please.” I rub my hands down my face then go back to staring at my beer.
“I’m not gonna give you a hard time, promise,” she says as she slides onto the barstool next to me.
I blow out a deep breath that rustles the cocktail napkin.
“Are you okay?” She reaches out for my shoulder then thinks better of it.
“Nope.” I pop the letter P.
“What happened?”
“Didn’t Mina tell you?” Her name hurts.
“She couldn’t get much out besides it’s over and that she’s going to her parents’.”
I feel the tear collect in the corner of my eye a moment before it falls into my beer. I shove roughly away and turn my back on Courtney.
“What happened, James?” Her voice is soft, but unlike Jonas earlier today, it’s not timid or scared. Something about the solidarity is comforting.
“Turns out you were right all along?” I turn my words up at the end like it’s a question then gesture to the bartender. “Can I get a shot of whiskey, please?”
“Don’t give him a shot.” She has a way of sounding like she’s rolling her eyes. “It was never that I didn’t like you. It was that I didn’t like you two together. I didn’t like how she shrunk for you and I didn’t like that you didn’t stop it.”
“I stopped it,” I say before chugging my beer and smacking my lips at the stale, wet dog taste. “And I’d like a shot.”
She waves her hand in acceptance. “You didn’t have to end it to stop it.”
“You think you know…” I sigh.
“I mean I could say that I do—because I know a lot—but you’re right. I don’t know. So tell me.” She turns and waits patiently.
“I’ll always love her and that’s the reason I couldn’t watch us whither and die.” I get up and walk out before she has a chance to reply.
I scroll through the TV guide again. I’m not a big TV guy but something has to help numb my brain. I’m sprawled out, flipping, flipping, flipping when a movie highlights beneath the yellow selection beam.
Wayne’s World.
Good memories and bad get dredged up. I can’t help but think about that promise of a hand job. I should have let her slip her hand beneath my fly.
My finger acts before I decide.
All the sudden Mike Meyers in a black t-shirt, sporting a dopey look and pushing long,
dark hair behind his ears fills my screen. Mina would be over the moon right now. When Wayne says, “Oh yes, she will be mine,” I can hear it in her voice rather than his.
I miss her. I miss the way she would laugh with me. The way she would laugh at me. Just the singular sound of her laugh. I go to switch the channel but then another quote stops me. It is funny. Even if my heart is aching, I can analyze it all and agree, I should have watched this. I should have watched this with her and listened to her quote the movie in real time while she shoved her feet beneath my thigh.
I reach for my phone and unlock it. The picture of her asleep in our bed that I snapped the day we moved in together filters behind my apps. I can’t help but sweep my thumb across the screen, hoping that some miracle will make it real. It’s just smooth glass beneath my thumb as I click on the bright green text bubble.
She’s right there. A few words away.
Words.
They’re what got us here, maybe a few can get us out. I start typing.
I watched Wayne’s World today. I watched it and I laughed. I watched it and wished that I was watching it with you. I was right though…the nostalgia factor is a big part of it. Though my touchpoint for it is you. The things you used to say, the faces you made while you said them… I miss that stuff about you, Meen. The little stuff. The little stuff that amounted to absolutely everything.
I read it. Then reread it. Every word is the truth they’d find etched on my bones in an autopsy. But I can’t tell her any of them. I can’t tell her because it would hurt her. Because it wouldn’t make a difference on how it all turned out. I backspace until the text screen is blank.
When Wayne’s World is over, I put on Wayne’s World 2. Even though watching Wayne and Cassandra break up is a little sharp on the bruise purpling my heart, I can smile because I know the spots that would make Mina smile. I even close a few of my brewing articles and replace them with lists of the top Wayne’s World quotes, telling myself it’s because I want to remember not because I want to quote them to Mina if I get the chance to see her again.
IF. A tiny word has never seemed so monumental. I can’t deal with one side or the other, I can just repeat it over and over and over.
To avoid feeling anything, avoid feeling what happens when I do see her again, or what happens when I don’t, I click over to her movie collection. The list of Mina’s movies fills the screen. All the live action Disney movies, all the Harry Potter movies, Twister, The Mummy, Romeo + Juliet, all the Jurassic Park movies, A River Runs Through It…
I remember Mina talking about this movie—well the book and the movie—when I realized that I’d fallen for her. She’d made me switch her seats when I took the one closest to the window. At first she’d just asked with big, batting eyes and a please that drug out to twelve syllables. But then she started peeling back layers of herself.
She told me she needed that seat because she got anxious with her back to doors, she couldn’t focus on the table, on the conversation, if she kept thinking about who or what was behind her. I laughed because it made her sound like she belonged to some crime family. She proceeded to tell me that she’d never seen The Godfather. One, two or three.
After that, piece by piece of her fell away and for the first time I saw a woman for who she was not who she was around me. She talked about things that made her eyes light up and her smile twitch without making it. Back then she always had to make it.
Then she started talking about A River Runs Through It, about some of the words in the book and how they captured them in the movie. How she loved the sound of Robert Redford’s voice as he recited Norman Maclean’s words.
I can hear her voice as she said them that day in that brewery.
It wasn’t a big moment to anyone around us. I don’t know that it was a big moment at all. But she got soft, and that purr I now recognize from bed, was smooth and seductive like a river running over her words. The passion in them drew me in. They made me a voyeur when it came to Mina MacLennan. I needed to see that passion peeking out again.
I need it now.
So I turn on the movie just like I did with Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2. I turn it on and am just as rapt with it as I was the first two, only this time I feel so much more than I bargained for. I shove away the tears and the sound of her voice when the truth of the movie hits me. The reasons Mina loves it too.
I bolt from the couch to find the book. I haven’t seen it in the house but I know it’s there. I know it because I know Mina.
My fingers run along the spines of the books on the bookshelf one at a time, reading with my fingers, my lips, and my mind. Relishing the space that her fingers have felt. My fingers know I’ve found it before I read the title. The spine is ragged, creased through in so many places that it makes it bumpy and the paperback has a new texture. One I haven’t felt before, as if it has thinned and worn but also built up gunk and stick. Sticky notes spring from the pages.
Cinderella starts playing in the background as I first flip to her marked pages then start from the beginning. And when I read the quote,
“For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them—we can love completely without complete understanding.”
I realize how I could have loved her, how things could have been, and the fact that it’s not my reality punches a hole into my already failing heart.
I’ve fallen into a well of Mina. I’m reading her books, watching her movies, and breathing in the remnants of her like I need them to live. The objective and logical part of me sits perched on my shoulder judging the hell out of me. I know it’s not healthy, it’s not bringing her back, but I’m calling in sick and doing it anyway.
Maybe it’ll get her out of my system.
Maybe I’ll find something like the letters Tanner sent that reminds me why I made the choice in the first place.
Somewhere around the time Bill Paxton makes a wild plea to Helen Hunt to let him love her, I go back to the bookcase. I can’t listen to him begging her to let him in, knowing that Mina and I both begged each other the same at some point or another.
I’ve taken to picking out my next book off her shelf by touch. The more creased and ragged it is, the more I know she loved it. The more I need to read it. I close my eyes and walk my now well-worn track down the shelf until my fingers stumble on soft supple leather. It’s not creased and haggard like some of her paperbacks, it’s not missing the paper jacket like so many hardbacks but it still stops me.
When I open my eyes a small leather journal sits beneath my fingers. They fall away as I realize that I’ve seen it in Mina’s bag many times. It’s her journal, tucked into the bookshelf, and I haven’t noticed it until now. I reach for it with a singular outstretched finger, sliding it on a diagonal out from between two thicker books. Just when it’s about to fall, I stop myself and push it back in.
Submerging myself in Mina is self-indulgent, and maybe a little self-destructive, but the key is it’s self. I’m not invading her life and thoughts and feelings. I’ve hurt her enough.
I turn away from the shelf only to find all hell breaking loose on the TV screen. The drive-in movie theater is being ripped to shreds and it makes a small, breathy puff of a chuckle leave my chest. Mina loves disaster movies and for the life of me I’ve never been able to figure out why. They’re campy at best and implausible each and every time. I can’t help but wonder what someone who’s experienced tragedy at the hands of a disaster feels when they watch the blatant exploitation of destruction, but they make Mina smile. Every time. Volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, hell even Sharknados…
It’s one of the million things I should have asked her. I should have asked her any and every little question that materialized in my mind. Just like she did. I was too busy protecting myself from… From what in the end? Myse
lf? Now that she’s gone, I wish I knew. I wish I knew everything.
Without hesitating, I turn back toward the shelf and snatch that journal. I don’t believe in hell, but if it exists, I’m already there, so I start reading.
July 27th, 2020
To my doomed eternity,
I know you know Greek mythology, there is an endless wealth of knowledge locked carefully behind your crisp eyes, but do you ever think of Sisyphus?
Do you ever think of me?
Do you ever wonder what it feels like to endlessly roll the boulder uphill? Or more importantly to watch it fall?
I can tell you because you are my boulder. The one that I am forced to roll up hill, the one that I know will fall but that I roll anyway. Doomed for eternity to think of my hands on you as I push enough for both of us. And when things are good, hope courses through my veins and I am certain—CERTAIN—I’m getting somewhere. It’s the feel of your skin against mine. It’s my head resting on your shoulder in the moonlight. The taste of you.
God I can’t shake the taste of you.
But we’ll fall, won’t we? That’s what we do. It’s kind of our thing. You’ll roll right over me and every single bone of mine will break. Again. The words will come like they do now, I’ll want to carve them into our stone with the blood seeping out of me. Will you notice that I’m decimated? Will you read the drippings of my soul set out for you?
Or will you just wait for me to pick myself up, put my torn-up hands against that rough hewn stone I know so well and start pushing all over again?
July 28th, 2020
To everything I felt before,
I wish I hadn’t burnt those letters. I wish I hadn’t burnt those letters and I don’t know why.
Things are so mixed up inside of me that I can’t tell if I want to read them to you or to remind myself of what happened before.