Nonfiction by Halle Collins
I never thought I was invincible. Well, maybe not as much as Will did. Did I negate eating an entire can of frosting in one sitting with having a young heart? Maybe. But I never drank or smoked- I didn’t want to, and I was a broke college kid- who could afford that? I never drove recklessly or gave in to road rage. My body is young; that much I am willing to excuse, but I am mortal. I am just as much at the expense of chance and luck as anyone else.
Will seemed to think the opposite. He was young, so he needed to experience all those things before his body and mind failed him. He had more miles and marks on his body than I did. I never judged him for it; I was just more aware of death than he was. In a morbid way, that kept me safer than him.
So does that make this a cautionary tale? Maybe.
“How are you holding up?” comes a voice. I shrug.
“I’m in the denial stage, so pretty good. Everyone expects me to be a blubbering mess, but I’m not. I’m enjoying the shock value of that so far.” Mischa stops beside me, her hands in her raincoat pocket. The material of her jacket rustles every time she moves, her boots leaving tread marks in the mushy ground. I tug at my t-shirt, the wet cotton clinging to my body.
“Must be kind of nice. Being numb.” Her eyes are rimmed with red.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to sound insensitive—”
She shakes her head.
“No worries. Everyone grieves at a different pace.”
We stand in silence for a moment.
“Is there something you want to talk about?” I ask, trying to offer a distraction. Mischa wipes her nose on the back of her jacket sleeve and shakes the rain out of her eyes. The rain condenses at the front of her hood and drips down into her bangs, making them stick to her forehead. It makes her dark hair look even darker, plastered onto her face.
“Every conversation I have now just seems like a distraction. Like everyone’s trying their best to cheer me up, and Will isn’t exactly a cheery topic now.”
“Yeah. I appreciate everyone’s efforts, but there’s only so many sorrys I can hear before it doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
“I didn’t—never mind,” she says, starting before changing her mind.
“Whatever you want to say, say it. Even if it’s something about Will, it’s probably true. He was a good guy, but he did a lot of stupid things. It gave us a lot of good stories about him. So whatever one you’re gonna tell me, I’ve probably heard it,” I say, trying to keep my tone light. While I may not feel Will’s absence, I don’t want Mischa to feel like she can’t say anything about him to me. Like she has to stay silent, choke her words back. Otherwise, she’ll suffocate on them eventually, and we’ll be right back at this cemetery, just at a different plot.
“I didn’t know he wanted to be buried,” she blurts out. “You talk so much about the future and all the little and big things, to the point where there’s sometimes where you just sit in silence and enjoy each other’s company because you feel like there’s nothing more to say…but we never talked about this.”
“I’d be kind of worried if that was something you two talked about,” I say with a small smile. She gives a weak laugh. It’s better than no laugh. “People your guys’s age shouldn’t be planning for that stuff. Thinking about death like that.”
She turns to me, some humor back in her dull eyes. “Oh, and you can?”
I shake my head, playing along. “I’m a philosophy major. I brood on death and mortality so the rest of you don’t have to.”
She smiles softly before returning her gaze back ahead of her. “I don’t know, I just— never thought about all of that like this until now. I feel like I should start preparing for my own funeral.” It’s a macabre confession, and she knows it. But I don’t blame her.
“Death of people close to us reminds us of our own mortality. It’s only natural that you’d think about it now.”
She nods. “I want to be cremated.”
“Good choice,” I say, suppressing a smile in case this is a big revelation for her.
She nods. “Thanks. Thought you’d approve.” Odd thing to say, but these are odd times. How she deduced that, I’m not sure. Maybe it was all the time she spent with Will. Maybe she got to know how I thought by proxy, in some unconscious way. They’d dated all of high school— almost four years would have been plenty of time for her to pick up on that. Or it was just dumb luck. Luck that Will ran out of. Or maybe he gave it all to her.
But she was right, I did approve. There was something about being buried that I fundamentally didn’t like. Perhaps it is an innate human thing, born of the experiences of our ancestors. I have never drowned or been buried alive, but I, like all humans, know what the feeling of pressure in our chest means, what suffocation feels like. We know the weight means death. The instinctual human fear of drowning, of being buried alive. So why people wanted to be locked in a box and buried under the ground was a mystery to me. There is something to be said for giving yourself back to the earth, but a coffin would prevent that. Something about my body slowly turning into a skeleton and staying trapped in a coffin for a century never appealed to me.
Yet this tombstone gives me comfort. Maybe that’s the secret of it all; none of the things we do for the dead are really for them, they are for us. To comfort in the absence of them, to keep the worries of our own mortality at bay.
“Do you think you’ll still go to Georgetown?”
Mischa shrugs. “I think I still want to, but—you know, Will and I made so many plans there. We picked our class schedules together. I feel like there’s too much there to remind me of him.”
I nod. We gaze at the stone for a long while, the little gray slab. Is he suffocating under all the dirt?
No, he loved the earth, loved the way it pressed against his boots, the way it pressed back, always supporting him, always holding him. He loved the way it smelled when the sky cried on it. In that way, he was different from me. Will is—was—a spawn of the earth, of rocks and support. He thought of the rain as something caring, something to nourish the flowers sprouting up from the dirt, but I loved the way it wiped away all traces of human existence from the ground.
Will loved the way the rain made the ground smell. Petrichor, he called it. The blood of the gods.
Is this the gods, then, who bleed on me? To wash the last traces of Will from the Earth? To comfort me, as some sorry payment for what they’ve taken? Was it luck or chance or fate that he ran out of, that ended him up like this?
“Do you think you’ll go to the court hearings?” Mischa asks. I hold out a hand, letting the rainwater drip into it before shaking it off. I bunch up the bottom of my shirt and wring it, letting more water fall from it. Not that it matters— in this persistent rain, my t-shirt is going to stay wet.
“If his mom or dad asks me to for the support, absolutely. But they’re private people. I don’t think they want any more of a circus than the news has already made it. And I— the girls who hit him were both minors. I don’t think his parents are going to get the justice they want.” I pause. “Did they ask you?”
“They didn’t ask, but they said they understood if I didn’t want to go. I’ve been at their house a lot this past weekend. I think it helps, having someone else in the house with them.”
“I’ve talked to them both a couple times, but I haven’t gone over. I— I don’t want to remind them.” Or do I? Am I leaving them alone to help them? Or is walking into the house where Will was, seeing the couch we watched movies on and the counters where we did homework and the shelves in his room lined with trophies from our high school swim team and the Star Wars comforter that I got him as a joke for Christmas his freshman year, and the—
“I think they’d like to see you.”
Am I leaving them alone out of respect, so they can grieve, or am I avoiding them because it will make Will’s death real? Do I not want to go with them to the courthouse because I truly don’t think it will bring them closure? Or because I can’t look at the girls who were idiots enough to get drunk and then get behind the wheel and the parents who raised them to think that was a good decision? Do I not want to sit with Will’s parents in that room because my presence will remind them of Will, or because I can’t bear to look at the last living reminders that Will ever existed? Well, except for Mischa. Perhaps it’s her presence here, and the gray tombstone staring up at me, that finally cracks the wall inside me. That finally makes me feel that hole. That finally makes me feel Will’s death.
She might understand. She might not grieve in the same pattern, at the same pace that I do, but she mourns and misses Will just the same. She stands beside me, staring at the tombstone, the little name and all the memories it holds. She’s drowning too— maybe not as deeply, but there is still water surrounding her, ichor in her lungs.
The grief weighs her down, her boots sinking deeper and deeper into the mud, and I wonder if she’s trying to bury herself in earth, join Will somehow. I want to answer her, to tell her I want to go, that she’s not alone in the way she feels, that all this pressure and rain is not only drowning her, but I can’t force any words to come. So instead, I cry. Small tears at first, then sobs that rip themselves from my body. Micha doesn’t say anything, just folds me into a hug. I bury my head in her shoulder and grip her tight. I feel the pressure of four years of friendship and Will’s love wrapped into her hug, and I cling to it, like she’s the last tree branch I can grasp onto to keep the flood from carrying me away.
I don’t know how long we stand there, but when I pull away, the tears have lessened.
“Sorry,” I say, sniffling deeply, trying to wipe off my face with my wet t-shirt before realizing the futility of it. But somehow, the pressure that was crushing me so severely it made me numb has lessened. It’s still there, but at least now I can feel it. At least now I can share it.
“No worries,” she says, gently squeezing my hand.
“Would you mind—could you come with me to the house? I think talking to his parents would do all of us good.”
She smiles, the first true smile I have seen from her since Will died, like the first ray of sun peeking out from behind the clouds after a storm. “Of course,” she says. I grip her hand tighter and let her lead me out of the graveyard, away from the buried coffin, away from the tombstone, away from Will.
Will is already dead and buried. I don’t need to go with him.
