‘the unreal’
jess —
it has been two years since you died.
on friday, i was walking to the bus stop, passing people drinking & laughing & having a good time after work, before the weekend. i was thinking how easy it is for normal people to do normal things, how some things & some days will not ever be normal for mom, dad & me.
i was on the bus home from a night out with friends, thinking how much you would like them & would like what we did. but it wasn’t right in my head, the thought. you would have liked them, you would have liked what we did: an edit of a tense to remove the potential that these things could occur.
in creole dialects, they use the irrealis mood to refer to unreal time: the would haves, might dos, could bes. i understand little of both creole & linguistics & often english, but if they have a tense to describe the unreal, then i’d like to be able to communicate that way too because i feel like i’m running out of ways to describe things.
what was; what happened; who we were. what we would have done; who we might have been; things we could have seen.
this is what’s left in the unreal.
it creeps up on you, the unreal does, telling your story with a ‘we’ instead of an ‘i’, referring to a number that it increases by one. or it flips it completely, giving you space & freedom & blankness to be just one stare of a person who has nothing & everything behind the eyes, the ability to respond politely, laugh out loud but not from the gut & to dodge & duck questions that require math or timekeeping.
sometimes i wonder if we’ll sit down & talk about what happened, go through it all with each other: the where we weres, the how did we get homes, the flights & days & decisions. sometimes i want to tell someone these things that are mine, tell them the bits i remember from the shower, the airport, the kitchen, the road. this unreal is a protection from the pain that smashes your temples together, puts a hand on your throat & bricks on your chest.
these days, i sit in meetings or at long pub tables or lie in bed & a little light will go off. all the sound is sucked out of the room & it’s quiet, even though mouths are moving or music is still playing. i think, this is my life now, & the light blinks off again, sound returns.
i’m happy; i’m angry. i’m satisfied; i’m sad. i’m running out of ways to describe things; i am finding ways to remember.
it is impossible to describe to anyone the power of the unreal, the broken promise of a life you always thought you’d know. i think dad & mom & i are growing into being okay, growing into a version of happiness, which means accepting the unreal as part of our lives instead of fearing it or not accepting it. i remember sitting in the car with ashley once, deciding together that no one was ever going to understand our unreals, our pain of living without you. i think that’s true whether we have words to describe it or not.
i love you so much. i miss you so much. i wish you were here. to me, it doesn’t matter if it’s two years or two hours. i think about you all the time, both you as you were & you being gone.
