It’s Been a While

After graduation, Mae and I didn’t speak again for two years. It wasn’t so difficult; I’m sure we both agreed it was for the best. At first, I got by with texts I drafted and never sent.

Hey! I’m still in Boston for a few days, wanna hang out?

I just moved into my new dorm (it’s so much nicer than Warburg Hall).

I miss you.

You were a real bitch.

Have you started classes already?

Once college started I took to dialing her number but never calling it, then writing letters but never delivering them. In my third semester, after taking my first poetry workshop, I started writing poems to her as well:

Fuck you

And your hair

And your shoes

And your elbows.

 *****

I like to think she wrote things like that to me too—I hadn’t been the greatest friend either. By the time Cory died, we had moved on in our own ways. She dated new men, I left for Los Angeles. Within my first week living in that new city, I developed a ritual of sitting outside every afternoon to watch the trees move. The thing about Southern California is that there usually aren’t any clouds in the sky. It’s kind of dumb actually. There’s nothing to measure the wind by, nothing to gaze at during class, nothing to fill that vast, empty, solid blue above the buildings and people and flowers. It makes the sky seem less like an “up” and more like a “top,” not at all like the layered skies of New England. It took some time, but from sitting outside everyday, I eventually learned to stop seeing it as a great lid and start seeing it as one very large cloud spread thinly above the horizon.

There was a green iron bench on campus behind a patch of ferns and palm trees where I could watch people walking to and from their classes and wonder about their lives. On occasion something funny would happen—someone would fall off a skateboard, or two people who only kind of knew each other would meet and suffer through suggesting coffee sometime. For the first few months after I found this bench, I took to writing these moments down on pieces of scrap paper. There was something about this quiet cruelty that brought me peace. I would indulge in these painful interactions, laugh at them on paper, then rip them up and throw them all away. I started feeling happy again, and healthy. In the mornings I would attend my classes, then have lunch with my new friends, then find my bench and sit in the shade in the breeze and not think of her or of boarding school at all. That’s what I did for the better part of two years, and that’s what I was doing when she called.

 *****

She was crying. Not hyperventilating, not screaming profanities, just crying. It was a new sound to me, kind of round and gurgling. On the phone it sounded almost like a laugh. I was so busy wondering how I had never heard her cry before that I completely missed the first words she said to me after two years.

“What?” I said.

“Fuckin hell. Cory is dead.” She sniffed, sobbed. “His funeral is this weekend.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Ok.”

“How are you holding up?”

“How the fuck do you think I’m holding up?”

 *****

The call ended, and two days later I was on a plane back to Boston. It was snowing when I landed—strange, it didn’t even feel like summer had ended back in California. I got the funeral details from our mutual friend Allen, who said I could crash on his couch. When he picked me up from the airport, he gave me a big hug and asked if I was ok. He was wearing a button down—classic Allen, always the professional one. We drove around the city, shopped for a winter jacket, joked about visiting our old campus. We talked about Cory too. Maybe we should have talked about Cory more? It seemed improper to, but also improper not to. Disrespectful either way. He was dead, absent, missing out on life. Sucks. Neither of us had known him super well—maybe that was disrespectful. I knew he had liked listening to Pink Floyd and used to study in the third floor of the humanities building at the table under the window with the crack in the upper left corner. He hated cereal but loved cereal milk. He loved Mae; who didn’t back then? At night, Allen drove us back to his apartment and we shared a blunt on his balcony.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” he said as he passed me the lighter and the blunt.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I guess it’s been a while.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

 *****

It turned out neither of us had really been joking about visiting campus. The next morning we were both awake when it was still dark outside and decided to drive around the city again but took the wrong turn and thought why the hell not, might as well. There was a particularly familiar mailbox about fifteen minutes away from campus that made me queasy when we passed it. By the time we reached the entrance to the school, I was wondering if we should just leave after all, but before I said anything, Allen started laughing. “Well, it’s too late to turn back now,” he said, so we drove through the black iron gates, past the large crimson sign that read “Borcher’s Academy 1901,” and parked in the back lot where our car was least likely to be seen.

It was just like visiting any old memory: everything was slightly different. There were tulips outside the dining hall instead of pink roses. Underneath the bench where Mae and I had carved a tiny penis during our sophomore year, there was another keeping it company. But then, it was all too much the same. The century-old, hand-carved wooden plaques lining the walls, warmed until fragrant by the convection heaters under the windows. The third stair in the humanities building which creaked more on the left side than the right. The patch of dead grass just outside of the dining hall where students cut across the big circle lawn to rush inside for the dinner line. It was all just the same.

We silently branched off to explore on our own paths; Allen went to the STEM building and I walked out towards the library. Mae and I had first met in this library, over six years ago now. I don’t remember the first words she said to me, but I remember she had long, coarse black hair and was wearing a hairband that reminded me of my best friend growing up. Back then she wore thick, rectangular glasses too, and always had a scarf around her neck. By the end of that first day, after we discovered we lived in the same dorm and after she gave me the nickname “asshat,” we were always together. By the end of that week she was dating Noah Sloane. By the end of that month Noah Sloane had dropped out of Borcher’s and she was dating Allen.

Mae was the one who convinced me to join the orchestra, and board games club, and indie music club, and squash. Maybe that had been the problem; maybe we did too many of the same things. For a while though it was all fine; we were both enamored of each other and of the idea of boarding school. Everyday, we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. We went to squash practice together, rehearsed together, studied together. Halfway through the first semester she started hanging out more with Eve Harkness, and once I started focusing on homework more than her things got tense and stayed that way for the next three years. Still, even back then, every night I was in her room, gossiping or reading or drinking the wine that her mom smuggled in for her on the weekends.

She moved on from Allen almost as quickly as she moved on from Noah. Next was John Lee, then Timothy Lin, then John Stanton. Then Andrew Serazin. We all knew that relationship was a terrible idea from the start, including Andrew, but they were together from October 11th, 2015 to March 8th, 2017. When he broke up with her, when he told her that he was in love with Soo-Hyun Choi and that he couldn’t stay in their toxic relationship because it was driving him insane, she came back to me.

We stopped gossiping, stopped studying. We kept drinking. At night I held her through her elaborate grief: her punctuated inhales, her gaping exhales, her insults and her spasms. I combed her hair. Whispered to her. Wondered what it was about her that made me want to be forever by her side. Maybe it was the way she said my name, like a giggle or a profanity depending on the day. Maybe it was the way she laughed all through the night, sometimes drunk but sometimes not. Maybe it was just because I was by her side already and got used to it. At that time the reason didn’t matter. Classes didn’t matter, orchestra didn’t matter, people generally didn’t matter. She was warm, and soft, and heartbroken, and mean. I wanted to hold her like that every night for the rest of my life.

Then she started dating Kelly Blunt, and they lasted a few weeks before Mae dumped her for Cory.

 *****

The funeral began at 10:00 am at the Rosewood Cemetery, five miles away from Borcher’s. Cory was a day student back when we were all together, one of the few people who drove himself to school. That was the reason he and Mae started dating in the first place; she wanted someone to get her off of campus every other day, and I suppose he wanted her. One-sided from the start, just like the others. After rehearsal one evening she pulled him behind the library, and the next day they were a couple. That was around the time she stopped talking to me.

I never liked white lilies, but those were the flowers lining the halls of the funeral home, and obviously I couldn’t complain. Imagine complaining about the choice of flowers in a funeral home—talk about disrespectful. Symbolically though, they seemed like an odd choice for a funeral home. Virgins and death, kinda like ice cream and steak. And against yellow walls? It was an artistic catastrophe, absolutely unpoetic. I was getting nervous. Mae was already there when we arrived, talking to Cory’s parents. Old memory, slightly different. She’d lost weight again. Her hands weren’t shaking quite as much. She seemed calmer, a little deader. It took her a while to notice us, but when she did she said “hey” and it was like being at home.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

We approached Cory in his cozy coffin and placed roses on his empty chest. It’s always bizarre seeing a dead person up close, especially a dead person who’s been fiddled with to look less dead. Cory was a lot smaller in the red velvet and satin of his coffin, and the way they set his face made him seem like he was in the middle of a sigh that would never finish. I didn’t say anything to him, neither did Allen, neither did Mae, but when one of Cory’s old baseball mates came up I heard him say, “Hey, it’s been a while.”

Mae didn’t give a eulogy; I half-expected her to. She was dramatic like that, self-obsessed like that. On the plane ride over I had imagined her standing at the podium and throwing a fit over how Cory had broken up with her a year into college. But she was sitting mutely beside me, holding her own hands, composed. Eulogy after eulogy passed by; it was solemn and uncomfortable. A proper funeral.

The burial went well too, and the reception where they had little sandwich squares—they were actually super delicious, I felt bad eating them—and afterwards Allen drove us to Boston Harbor. Mae and I sat together while he went to buy us all beers. She hadn’t spoken much to me in all this time. In fact, she hadn’t spoken much at all. After two years of silence, what was there to say anyway? Waves sloshed up against the stone wall we sat on, and the faint smell of oysters and gasoline mingled with the fog in the air. There were clouds in the sky. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” she finally said. I thought her voice quavered, and then I thought it was because of me.

“Yeah.”

“You never called.”

“You never called.”

“I guess.”

“I’m sorry though, I should’ve called.”

“You haven’t changed.”

 *****

There were things I wanted to tell her. I wrote a book and published it a few months ago. I switched majors three times but ended up back at English. I joined a dance team, then got recruited for the squash team by one of my dance partners. I sold my violin. I broke my foot. I did change; I changed a lot.

I had a boyfriend now too, we’d been dating for several months. His name was James. I wanted to tell her that I met him on a dating app and then again in a class, and that one night after a party his friend drove a bunch of us home and we sat next to each other and while everyone else was singing show tunes he took my hand and squeezed it, and that at the moment I felt like even the tiniest flex of my fingers was a pronouncement of eternal love and devotion—my pinkie twitched a little too much; was I harassing him?—but that he was softly stroking that space between my thumb and index finger with his thumb, so I thought surely he was going to make a move.

He didn’t end up making a move. He didn’t end up asking me to go to a bar or to an altar. I wanted to tell her that after that night we didn’t hook up, I went back home, and for three weeks I went absolutely crazy over this guy, and that apparently for three weeks he went a little crazy over me too. That eventually three weeks later we met at another party and I got too drunk and started crying and told him absolutely everything I had been feeling, and that the next day I woke up fully clothed in his bed and he woke up in a sleeping bag on the floor. I wanted to tell her that I thought he was really great and that I was happy with him. I wanted to tell her that sometimes he almost made me feel like I did at Borcher’s. With her. Almost.

*****

Boats in the harbor bobbed up and down, up and down. In the distance Michael Bublé was playing from some giant speaker in Quincy Market. It was a real mood killer honestly—Mae hated Bublé. His voice echoed all the way to our ears, across the horde of tourists in the market, across the carts selling Ivy League merchandise, across the black snow heaps lining the roads. “What a shitty song,” I said.

And then she was crying. Again? I hadn’t been expecting it. I thought she had done all her crying two days ago, but there she was crying in front of me, and suddenly I was holding her again, and combing her hair, and whispering. I was waiting for her to yell at me like she used to. “You never called, you cunt. You never called, not even when he broke up with me, not even when I was alone in Toronto, not even when I thought I was going to die, you absolute fucking twat. I hate you, you never liked him or us, and now he’s dead and I wish it was you.” And then I would say, “You don’t know why I never called? What you did to me? What you were to me? Why didn’t you call when you left me?”

But she didn’t say those things, she didn’t really say anything, she just cried, and cried, and when Allen came and put his arms around us too, instead of screaming and spitting and slapping, she only choked out the words, “I miss him.” It was pitiful, it was genuine, she cried for Cory and only Cory. Her sobs were not violent or dramatic, they were meek. They were honest. Impossible, unimaginable, absurd. Why had I never realized? When did this happen? She loved him. She still loved him. She never forgot about him.

She forgot about me. She had never called because she forgot about me. Ours was the in-between relationship, the this-person’s-death-wouldn’t-make-me-a-poet relationship. Isn’t it peculiar how someone can mean so much to you, and you not as much to them? Jealous of a corpse. And how could I not be? In the two years that I didn’t speak to her, she had learned to love like me.

 *****

When I arrived back in California it was 82ºF and I had to take off the sweater I wore to the airport. James picked me up. He asked me how it went, and I said, “Fine.”

“Did you see anyone there?”

“Allen. You know Allen. And some of Cory’s friends. And Mae.”

Dust particles floated down before my eyes like snow in a breeze. I felt them collect like mud on my cheeks. I said a lot of things to James on the car ride back, for the rest of the day, for the rest of the night. He listened. He asked questions. He held me and combed through my hair.

“Did you love her?”

“Yeah.”