terminally chalant

the life was gone from your eyes then

they couldn’t even look into mine

like a sick dog scorned

I remember the slam of my sneakers on the pavement

The mosquitos that attacked any minute of flesh

I came up to the group of trees and hill where my friends and I used to play

And all I see is rolling hills of fake grass

I remember reading on those hills

And the golfers yelled at me

Sometimes I wished you were one of them

So you’d have a reason to leave the prison you’d built for yourself

My nails dug into my palms as I handed over the cash and you handed over your ID

my last few hours of being a child

The cashier gave me a pitying look and I hated you

I wish you’d yelled back

I wish I didn’t spend my 18th birthday yelling at you then fleeing

Is that why I am always so angry

Why didn’t you yell back

Your anger though rare was sometimes upsetting

But it was better than taking a gun to a dead animal again and again

You told me when I was a kid I’d be a good lawyer

But lawyers don’t usually win in a forfeit

Lawyers don’t yell at a statue

my hands always move from side to side

tapping my leg the air or the table

i hear sounds around me constantly

the monotonous bells in the dusty hallway

that feel like they’re calling to me

i see your art on the kitchen counter

it’s black and white, a postcard

i feel like I’m being taunted

you’re in my dreams frequently

i hear your voice and feel your hand

the sick, shaky hand turns back into the soft, sturdy one i once knew you to have

your piano is all alone

alone in that room where you used to play

i can picture it more clearly than my own reflection

the room is covered in brown and pale yellows

there’s faded florals on the furniture

I’d never noticed how faded they could become until you faded from me

i miss the times when i was young

chubby cheeks and pigtails

running around to avoid practicing

i played the songs from frozen on the keys

i never played from your book of hymns

you told me to stop pecking on the piano

It has been two weeks. Two weeks since I received the news that my grandmother was gone. Or, if we wanted to get caught up in the details, sixteen days ago. A little over two weeks.

Gone is a weird word. It’s a word that can accompany all different kinds of leaving. For instance, one can say “she’s gone to the supermarket,” or to describe a state of being, such as “he’s gone mad.” It can refer to a breakup, or a fallout, or even a casual form of description for something inanimate or trivial, like on the 19th, TikTok was gone (though that only lasted a few hours, unlike the untimely passing of my grandmother, which did not have a twelve hour turnaround.) However, in this case, gone means forever. Not breathing. Passed. To put it indelicately, dead as a doorknob.

I am luckier than others, as I was able to experience twenty-one years with her. However, an obvious indication of my naiveté that I so often struggle with is that I expected it to be so much longer. Obviously not forever, but, I thought she’d at least be there for my college graduation. I’m sure the greedy bastards on the college board are grateful that there’s one less seat to have to pay for. Maybe this saved her from the boredom of it. I am trying to look on the bright side in my own sardonic way, because that’s the me she remembered, and I don’t want her to have to deal with character assassination or decay as she watches my life like a television show from heaven. That is, if she has time. I do not know the schedule there.

Sometimes I feel stupid in my mourning. After all, it’s part of life. Everyone’s grandma dies. And even if their grandmas have not died yet, they have put it into the universe so much with their excuse emails to their professors about why they did not do their homework it may as well happen tomorrow. Grandparents, by design, are not meant to last forever. But is it not human nature to feel overconfident, greedy, and ignorant to the limits of our species?

I was not prepared to take on this grief. But I always knew, at least in the back of my mind, that it was coming soon. I knew that our conversations would become more and more numbered, or that every birthday she had became closer and closer to being her last one.

Funerals are weird. Visitation is weird. Tons of people, ones I had never known in my entire life, or ones I had heard about in passing stories but felt more like passing Sims in my family’s life than real people, coming up to me, hugging me. It feels terrible to admit, but every hug I received I yearned, itched for hand sanitizer. Their warmth, while appreciated, did not fall on an appreciative body. I stayed cold and rigid, and when it came time to sit in that church, this did not change.

Christian funerals offer another form of surrealism that, in my opinion, is often unmatched. When you operate in a religious setting, nothing is ever truly about you. All the ways in which you live, your birth, marriage, childrearing, and eventual death are all part of God’s plan. Essentially, God has a Notion page and we are all just meaningless tabs upon it. When the pastors spoke, they spoke about how she served God in everything she did. I felt my nails dig into my palms as they became a fist. It shouldn’t have made me angry. After all, that’s what she would have wanted, but was everything she did for God? She was a woman, yes, a woman of the Church, a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife, a grandmother, but she was still a person.

Throughout the funeral, people only ever had nice things to say about her. They said she never had a harsh word to say about anyone. This also troubled me, and it made me realize something. My great aunt said that she and I had always had a special bond, and it made me realize, she had shown a side of her to me that she did not to many other people.

To put it crassly, she did have a harsh word to say. About a lot of people. And that’s because if I talked shit, she would do it with me. Of course, she would never put it like that, and everything she said could easily be disguised as classic Southern concern, but she used to laugh when I would put my hand under my chin in that manner that a friend from elementary school had done (something that irritated us to no end.) When a pretentious friend from middle school said something so incredibly condescending and foolish, we would repeat it back to each other and laugh. Her pastors and her friends at church saw her as this kind of Saint, but to me, she was my grandmother. The woman who took me to school and home, who was a bit of a hypochondriac and made me wear slippers around the house so that I did not catch a cold, who cooked and who hid away the books I would not stop reading over and over again. And they would never get to see that part of her. I wanted to make a speech, but I didn’t, because I was not asked to, but even then, maybe they were not supposed to know the side of her that I saw.

What the point of this is, I don’t know exactly. This is not exactly poignant, or organized, or anything. I feel stupid saying all the infographic “grief is complicated” bullshit, but they’re right. I’m going to end this now.