The Love You Want

3.

Trying not to pick at my nails was a chore as I wanted for the woman. Instead, I chewed on the end of the straw of my smoothie. I hadn't really wanted to get anything, but she had suggested a coffee shop, and it would be weird to go to a coffee shop and not order anything. I figured a smoothie was a safe option and probably had some vitamins I was missing. I tried not to think about how the girl who had taken my order had also made the smoothie, taking out fruits and vegetables, no gloves or handwashing in sight. I tried to think of other explanations -- she'd gone to the back at one point, maybe she had washed her hands then. Maybe that would have gotten rid of some of the germs, the ones that caused sickness.

I thought dying through sickness was the worst way to go. The knowledge that death is coming for you-- not that it isn't always, but that it's right there in front of you, and there's not much you never got to do, and you have time left but you're too sick to do any of those things that you wanted to do -- must be bone-rattling.

But then again, there was a different sadness in a sudden death. All of those things were left undone, but you'd never know it. But the people around you would know it. How many of us younger than middle-aged really met with a counselor and wrote a will? Hanuel didn't have one. His parents said they would try to get something for all of us from his "estate," as the legal professionals called it. But we all knew Hanuel didn't have that much money when he died, and besides, the dead boy's friends had already taken apart and run with the things that we really did want, if we couldn't have him back.

I hoped, I thought as I sat there stirring the smoothie endlessly, that there was an afterlife, and Hanuel could get married and have kids there, and build a better "estate" than he ever had in life. That way, when we finally saw each other again, we would both have everything we desperately needed.

I had never seen a picture of the woman before, but I knew it was her the second I saw her through the window. I knew the nervous, twitchy look she had, clutching the strap of her purse and looking down at the ground. I knew the look, because I was wearing it, too. I wondered which of us this was more difficult for.

She glanced through the window and our eyes met. She knew who I was just from looking at me, too. She paused, and I wouldn't have blamed her for running away. I tried to imagine what I looked like. Joan Didion said that a grieving person can always recognize a grieving person. I quickly unlocked my phone and found the description online: "extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness," the great writer had said. I had looked into my friend's faces, and seen myself in the mirror before I flinched away. We looked lost. We looked like the laws of physics had reversed on us, gravity suddenly becoming optional. Oxygen snuffed out candles, and water created fire when it met friction. Blood rained down from a clear green sky. The young die and the old persist. A butterfly beats its wings and a thousand miles away a neighborhood is blown into fragments by a bomb.

"Since when have you had green eyes?" my father had asked me once, shining a flashlight into my eye to look for a piece of dust irritating the fragile, disgusting, impossibly important part of my body. I'd laughed. My eyes were blue now, I was pretty sure. I wished they were brown.

I imagine the woman saw the "extreme vulnerability" in my changed eyes and knew I was the one.

The woman was beautiful, was my first thought as she walked toward me. My second thought was that I despised the blouse and bandages carefully covering the scar I knew was on her chest. "Don't you know how much that scar cost," I wanted to hiss. "You should be showing that scar off like a fucking Chanel handbag."

So, I still wasn't above being jealous. That was good to know.

Now that we had gotten here, neither of us knew what to say. I could have said I was happy for her recovery and hoped she was feeling better. She could have said she was sorry for my loss. But those things would cancel each other out. My loss was what gave her the chance to recover and feel better.