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Before You Go I Love You

A Short Story

By Sean HoustonPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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Before You Go I Love You
Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash

The saline enters my veins, and its cooling effect assures me the plasma donation is finished. I'm still on five cycles to complete the process, but getting closer to only needing four. A phlebotomist looks over to me. “Are you doing okay?” I nod and give her a thumbs up. One of the on-staff physicians, Katie, is disconnecting me. “You need to drink more water, Sean," she says as a playful scold. "Your next available donation date is the sixteenth."

"I'll see you then," I say, "thank you so much." I'm still in the new donor promotional period of donating, which is $60 for the first five donations. It's been over 10 years since I've donated, and it was a different plasma center so I qualified for being a new donor. I just need to make it to $730 to get that crown for my root canaled dead tooth. I'm feeling especially weak today, I can splurge on a Starbucks. Everyone is always so relieved I'm patient, being simply decent can be a rare gift in customer service. While I'm waiting, I look at a table. I remember sitting there with Olivia, her smiling and teasing me about my iced chai tea. I was caffeinated and talking passionately about my dreams, and she clung to every word. Her smile made it easy to open up. But her smile and all that made her wholesome in ways I'd never known are so far away now. That was 3 years ago. I never knew how to show her how much I loved her. How do people express what they feel in their hearts so quickly? I just need more time to say what things mean. The journal she bought me was supposed to be my magic feather. "Maybe if you write in this, it won't be as difficult." Now when I thumb through that little black book, I can't remember the importance of writing about the day she left me, and it all seems like jumbled ramblings I can no longer make sense of. She didn't want me to put my life on hold waiting for her, I remember that. She didn't know it was meeting her that was the great leap in life that I'd always been waiting to take. I tried explaining it in the end, but it came across as pleading words of desperation. I come home to a grocery bag hanging on my door handle with a bag of chicken strips in it that I bought the night before. My refrigerator broke this year, and the only way I found to keep things frozen is in the Pennsylvania winter. She slightly startled the first time she heard the clunk of the compressor cycling on and off, and now I miss that noise. There are so many things to fix, and I never blamed her for leaving.

The second day of plasma donation always feels easier, the muscle memory of squeezing your hand and relaxing at all the right intervals is fresh in your mind. My phone starts to ring on my last cycle, it's my mom calling. She's choking up, she’s struggling to say that today my grandmother passed away. I knew it was coming. The last time I saw my grandma she seemed like she lost her color, but not like she was pale, she looked gray, like Dorothy leaving the Technicolor dream world back to the black and white. I hated seeing her that way, her light slowly leaving her. Her breathing became harder, the emphysema slowly overtaking even the oxygen bottle's ability to fill her lungs, and I knew it was going to be any day that I'd be getting this phone call. I give a look of "I'm sorry" and a grimace to the phlebotomist looking my way for talking on the phone. Once I'm finished donating and I'm disconnected from the machine, I sit in my car and make the rounds of phone calls to family members to give them support. I've sat here for almost an hour and I forgot to turn my car on, hadn't noticed how cold I was until now. I know it's going to be a punch in the gut when I go over to my mom's house and see everyone, and I feel overwhelmed, so I take another hour to compose myself. I'm looking in the mirror at my beard that I've been growing to hide behind. I know my grandma would like me to be clean-shaven, but a mustache and goatee is a good compromise. I want her to be proud of me for trying.

When I make it to my parents, my mom is sorting through family pictures commenting on how pretty my grandma looks in them. My uncle is talking in-depth about Star Wars and how he wishes Dave Filoni had the reigns of the movies. I mention weights I saw on marketplace I'm thinking about getting, and we are all well versed in acting composed when we all feel awful. Everyone looks very nice when we make it to the funeral home for the viewing, but I feel guilty and underdressed in my sneakers that are a bit the worse for wear. Before we enter the room, we are all trying to keep the lumps in our throat from turning to tears. My mom is the first to crack and she's completely losing it, trembling and unable to stand by her side, and it's not long before whatever pretense of being collected yesterday has been dropped by everyone. It all feels too fast, and I wish I had more time. I have so much regret that I'm carrying it feels like I can't get out of this chair. I knew things were bad, but I still thought I had another day to call her. Time is a thing you can't ever get more of though, and the universe is unrelenting in its passage. I hear someone say in the background "they did a good job with her," for the makeup. Her age spots from smoking are prominent and they kept everything natural looking. It's the age spots that remind me this is the same person that loved me immensely, and openly. How did she do that? I wait until everyone's had their turn to say their goodbyes before I kneel in front of her.

"I love you, grandma. I wish... I wish I had more time to become the good man you'd always seen me as." I know "goodbye" is the next word to say, but I just can't do it. I don't want to say goodbye, because I know it won't be met with a hello the next day. I'm left with all these stray memories, and I don't know what to do with them. I know every second that goes by is taking me away from them, making them harder to remember. I want to hold onto us being at Applebee’s, one of her favorite restaurants, more evidence of her being salt of the earth. I want to remember the sound of her voice and her telling me to "hush," that I'm handsome, at my self-deprecating jokes. I want to still be able to feel the feeling of hugging her. To hear her words lilting through my ears about how she views life: "be happy with what you have." Words so soft and pure, and I just want to hear them again in her soft voice but I can't. The goodbye has to come for now—I owe her that courage.

After all the services, all the awkward small talk, and all the platters of grief food there's nothing left to do but to go home. I know the mess I come home to is an inability to work through trauma, but how do I let go, even if what I'm holding onto is pain? Some days it feels as if there's an endless to-do list of things to fix in my life, and heartache keeps happening when I feel ready to work on it. I've been thinking of Olivia a lot this week too, she was also good in ways I don't know if I could be. There were parts of me that were too broken without me realizing it when we started dating. I look over to my journal she got me, set on top of a semi-organized pile, and it feels like too much to write in it today. That is just too many things at once: a holy relic, a symbol of loss, a time capsule of the stage of grief I was in. Olivia was so happy to give me this, it was even personalized to me, and she specified how I could get replacement paper for this specific journal. I wish I filled it up a hundred times over with the unsaid beautiful poems of my heart. I wish I could have accessed, and navigated those feelings that felt bigger than I know what to do with.

After a few days of being alone and going through the motions at work, I go back to my parent's house. My mom is going through her mom's things while on the phone, unable to move anything to the donate pile away from the keep pile. All my grandma's books are splayed out, some are even duplicate copies. I love the idea of her buying a book she already read again, just because she liked it so much. There are also a couple of lighthouse decorative items, and several CDs of music she liked, and somewhere in all of this is a person. What do you do with all these stray pieces of a person when they're gone? Maybe it's a way of staying connected to them, each object or memory a doorway leading back to them so you can remember how you felt around them. My mom gets off the phone.

"Well Sean, I called to make sure, but your grandma had life insurance.” She says. “That sounds about like her, giving more than what she had even after death. When it's divided up it's going to be $20,000 for you."

"I don't, I don't understand." I say.

"Honestly, who does?" My mom asks, and smirks behind teary eyes. I still owed my grandma money she lent me, that every time I brought up to pay her back she said she didn't want me to pay back. I wish I could give it all back if it means being able to hear her laugh again. Any time I need to along the way in life, I can still go through all those doors of memories I have of her, and all that I am and ever could be feels like it's being saved by her warmth, and I feel okay about life. I always felt like more of a whole person in her presence, maybe she knew that. Maybe she saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. I've heard of flowers taking decades to bloom after all. Maybe she could see further than I could, to see all I needed was a little encouragement to bloom. Maybe she saw something beyond just fixing my teeth, or paying off credit cards. I don't know if I'm worthy yet of the value she saw in me, but I hope that someday I will be. While I’m taking the steps to get there, I can remember her to feel a little less broken as a person, and remember there’s something still worth trying to fix in me. Maybe that's what we do when we lose someone, is honor their memory by doing the best we can in life, and being the good that they see in you.

literature
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About the Creator

Sean Houston

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