Tangled In Strings

Chapter Twenty-Eight

This is familiar, truly familiar.

The lens to my world is blurry, and unfocused, constantly looming in attempt to snag onto some moments that will soon become memories, but find myself unable to linger long.

Some I already want to forget. The moment I knew I had to get up and compose myself as the paramedics came into the bedroom to retrieve his body was one. Another happened the day after, when the news broke that successful businessman Norman White had passed from an aggressive form of cancer and suddenly everyone was there. No one was before he had died, but by god, they made sure they were there after.

And in a way, I get it. Death sucks. Disease sucks.

It's hard to contemplate what to say to someone who's so quickly lost their freedom, their sense of being. Sorry is just never enough. Not even I love you can do it sometimes.

There really is nothing you can say to make everything better, and trying will probably only remind them of the fact. So, I get the people who run from that kind of confrontation, people who were business acquaintances, friends, colleagues, old college buddies. I get it.

A wife abandoning her husband I don't get, even if it was just a marriage of convenience. Monica should have been by his side, right along with me. She should have told him she loved him, even if she didn't mean it. He deserved to hear it.

And yet, here she is. Speaking to one of Norman's old friends a few feet away, and she's somehow able to smile. The fact that there is no remorse, no regret in her expression as Norman's coffin hovers in the background, waiting to be put into the dirt is hard to fathom. This is a woman I've known for over two years. A woman who I thought adored her husband.

She adored his money, and is no doubt waiting to get this over with so she can find out when the reading of the will is. Maybe I'm being too hard on her, out of bitterness that's seeped through my veins while we organized his memorial, and flew across the country to bury him beside Donna, who was buried at beside her parents—and beside her sister—the woman who until this year was always my mother.

In many ways, she still is. She's still the woman I remember raising me, remember hugging me when I'd wake from a nightmare, or protecting me when her husband would come home reeking of alcohol. But now, she's also the woman who trapped me in a childhood of traumatizing moments, knowing she could have saved me from all of it with one call.

She never made that call. She never called Norman. Maybe she needed me; maybe she thought she couldn't get by without me.

As I sit on one of the wooden chairs while everyone around chats before the service has to start, with one hand on my flat stomach, feeling the gravitational pull to the person growing within, a person I've never really acknowledged until this moment, I'm only confronted by how cowardly she seems to me now.

And how sad that makes me feel because I still love her.

Withdrawal is the only option at a time like this. I could choose to be present. I could choose to notice the color of the sky, or the type of flowers on the casket, or the outfits of the attendees. But I really don't want to be. I don't want to be here.

Both of my mothers are buried here. My father will be soon.

I wonder if I'll ever come back here after today. Something inside of me says not. This will bury into the abyss, into the place I store what I can't seem to handle, and I will move on with my life. I will get by, as I always have.

I'm not sure when the people begin to fill the empty seats, when the priest stands by the casket with his leather bible, nor when Giovanni's fingers slide between mine and tighten their hold. There are less people here than there normally would be, due to the traveling. Norman didn't care who showed, as long as he was buried beside Donna. That was his only request.