I Said Goodbye To Her Alone

I said goodbye to her alone. The hospital pillows overtook her small frame like she was drowning in them. Her normally manicured perfect flume of violet hair now depressed and a faded shade of white. She was in a black box, pixelated and glitchy, and I left my hand up in a frozen wave as I closed it. I turned my head and stared at the poorly painted wall next to me, wondering if perhaps that’s the sort of thing she was also looking at. Maybe the hospital room had a window she could look out. It was unknown to me; I would never know the inside of that hospital room, or which nurse would call it when that time inevitably came. I tried to remember the color of the scrubs her nurse was wearing. I ignored the most devastating facts while unimportant questions plagued me. What color her last Jell-O might be. The design of the socks she would be wearing when it came time to take them off her. Maybe sheep. Or frogs. I got her a pair of long socks with frogs on them once when I was on vacation years ago. I shuddered to think of how I walked the streets and went to restaurants - even a concert, all without the protection and comfort of a blue mask.

Days later, my phone pinged with messages of condolences. ‘I’m sorry’s’ and ‘I’m thinking of you’s’ and ‘hope you’re doing okay’s’. From people I knew and from people I barely knew and from people I hadn’t spoken to in years. I felt a self-hatred for the attention these people were giving to me, and from the short stints of pleasure I got from them. Pay attention to me, I whined to myself quietly in my head. Feel bad for me, I said with disgust.

“She left you something.” My mother was cold over the phone. Her sadness feigned.

“I don’t want it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I don’t-“

“It’s a good amount of money. You need it.”

There it was. She was reveling in my unemployment without saying it, like it was my choice to be laid off. But I had always been lazy, apparently. Like if I had just worked harder, this would have been someone else’s problem.

“Mom.” I sighed. I had no energy to fight her. I didn’t want the money. I didn’t deserve it.

“The check will come in a few weeks. I need to straighten things out with the lawyers first, but it shouldn’t take long.”

I heard a gust of wind in the background. And then the crashing of waves. I rolled my eyes. She was already enjoying herself.

I didn’t think much about that conversation over the next few weeks. A call from her was not a common phenomenon. Even with a death in the family. We were a cold lineage, like snow that had been frozen overnight with ice.

I did my daily routine. I went for runs that wound through the neighborhood, making large half circles around the people in my path while I listened to song after song and pushed myself until I couldn’t breathe. Maybe if I collapsed on the side of the path in the park, I would become an interesting news story. Or maybe a child would find me and I would be burned indefinitely into their mind as they grew older and older and wondered who I was and why I had been smiling as they found me. I would be a nameless person listening to sad songs that they would have to speak to several therapists about.

“Why were they listening to Alone by Heart?” The now grown child would ask their therapist one day.

“Well,” the therapist would ponder.

No one would ever know, and no one would ever find out. It wouldn’t matter anyway, because each time I’d feel like collapsing, I would undoubtedly make it back to my apartment in spite of my bleak delusions and hopes for the future.

So when the check did finally come, I pushed it to the edge of my coffee table, more interested in the only other contents of the package sent by my mother’s lawyers. The small black notebook looked like it had been doused in coffee and then blow-dried.

It smelled like her. I stared at it until the sticky little book got the best of me. It seemed as though she had chronicled almost everything; day-to-days that were boring but fascinating, bland but painted, and ranged from nail-appointments to doctors appointments to baseball game outcomes to musings on loneliness and why the neighbor wasn’t maintaining his orange tree. I read every entry with reverence, with a stilling concentration, like her words could solve the world’s problems. But the Marlins’ pre-season scores didn’t bring any existential solutions.

She did have some choice words for my mother, which made me crack a small smile. But as I neared the end of the tattered black book, my heart sped up a bit, my fingers felt a little numb. I was coming into the weeks before I would last see her on that screen. I let out a large, shattered breath.

Pat came to visit me this week. She was hesitant to come because of all this going on, I had to convince her. We wore masks and she brought hand sanitizer but I told her she was being silly and that we couldn’t cancel our annual time together because of this. She didn’t even want to go out to eat. Our favorite diner! She always was a worrier.

I stared at the page, the blotchy blue ink smearing into each letter, making it a dramatic prose.

There were a few more entries, but those were from inside the hospital.

I looked at the check sitting at the edge of the table, and frowned.