The Waiting Game

The First Letter

The first letter came four days after his funeral.

Gia, it began, and it changed everything.

I remember everything about that night—I was sitting up late into the morning hours, unable to sleep for fear of what I would see when I closed my eyes. When I dreamed, I dreamed of that night even though I wasn’t there. I hadn’t seen what happened to him and I hadn’t wanted to know all of the details, but somehow I could still see it in my mind as clearly as if I had been in the passenger seat. As though I had gone over that bridge with him.

The pain in my chest was a constant reminder of what I had lost.

When people die, I know that the positive thing to do is to remember the good things about them, to cherish their memory. But every memory I had of him cut me like knives into my flesh, twisting inside of my heart. When I thought of his smile or his laugh or all of the stupid things he would convince me into doing, it would hurt like nothing else had ever hurt before. It felt like I was being tortured, every inch of my skin being ripped from my body, not stopping even when I screamed and pleaded for mercy.

Some nights, I didn’t even have to see the accident scene behind my eyelids—I just saw him, smiling at me, and it felt like more of a nightmare than the accident had ever been.

No, I couldn’t be positive. I couldn’t be much of anything.

I’m not foolish—I didn’t shut down when he died. I felt lost, didn’t know what to do, confused, but I didn’t shut down and go catatonic and behave in a reckless manner like heroines do in books. I got up every morning at nine and I went about a typical teenage summer day as I always did. Nothing changed. Nothing but the gaping hole that he left behind, a hole that punched itself through my chest when they said to me:

Gia, he’s gone.

And now, I can’t breathe.

His funeral was on a Monday. He would have hated it—he thought that Mondays were a sin. His mother was broken, confused as she wandered between the guests, hugging and getting consoled, looking around like she didn’t understand why they were looking at her with pity in their eyes. His deadbeat father, the one he hated for so many reasons, stood in the back of the room, his gaze unwavering on the coffin. He had hated his father because he hadn’t ever been much of one, but the man flinched every time he looked at the place where his son laid. He still cared, even if he hadn’t shown it when his boy was alive.

I was the one that was in that weird space between the most important person to visit in the room and the one that hardly mattered. Teenage love, they called it. Faulty love. I knew for a fact that his family tut-tutted my name around the dinner table, saying that what we called love was an infatuation, and him and I would be broken apart before graduation. They had many words for me, mixtures of kind and cold, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care that they lingered just out of my reach, unsure of how to approach me. I didn’t care that they still didn’t know what to say.

I didn’t know what to say to them, either. It was hard to hate them for something when you couldn’t hate what they were doing even if you wanted to.

I had only one black dress, and I had worn it on our first real date. And then there I was, wearing it to his funeral. Before and after. A little black dress, sexy at first but now a symbol of mourning.

I sat through the service occupying my thoughts on how I was going to get rid of this dress when I got home. This dress and all of the memories that it held.

His grandparents had been broken. His aunts and uncles from both sides of the family were pale, horrified. Such a tragedy, I heard them muttering. Such a waste of life. But there was no doubt in my mind that they blamed him for what happened that night anyway.