Death and Other Interruptions

Chapter Seven

That night, I had a dream that Al had died. It was in a car crash, and when he came home to tell me he was dead I was so mad at him. I slammed the door in his face. "How could you die?" I yelled through the door. He didn't respond, and that's how I knew he was really dead, because Al could never shut up when he was alive. I woke up still fuming, my throat sore from yelling in my sleep. I felt empty inside, scraped raw. Al was gone forever. I would never see him again. The permanence of it all, the irreversible goneness, washed over me like a dark tide, dragging me down into a black hole like a Before in antidepressant ads. My future had been snuffed out in an instant. The source of my happiness, the single person who had become my reason to live, the vessel of my hopes and my dreams and my plans, was taken from me, and without my pillar I was crashed to the ground. I had begun forming my life around him, molding myself to him so that without him I was less than whole.

When I awoke it was the weekend and I knew no one would be visiting. While my friends could push themselves to visit during the week, they wouldn't cancel their weekend plans to hang out with a depressed mourner. Plus, they had all cycled through once; I had a feeling that was all I would be seeing of them for some time. I needed to get out of my apartment, and the only place I could think to go was home—the home I grew up in, not the home that reminded me so painfully of Al with every knick-knack and every cushion dent. This apartment had always been ours, together, and most of my memories of Al started or ended here.

The night after we moved in together—both leaving our own apartments so that it was a completely new place for each of us—we had our first big fight. Until then we'd had the usual petty fights the come with being around the same person all the time, but nothing serious, nothing that made me question our relationship's future. It was only because I was so certain of its permanence that I agreed to move in with him.

That night, though, Al felt he had done all the hard work of moving in. I had overseen the movers and taken care of planning, but he had unloaded the boxes and unpacked all the essential ones throughout the day. I felt that I was just as busy as he had been, so it couldn't be helped that one of our jobs involved more physical labor than the other's. We both yelled—and by that, since we were each so non-confrontational, I mean we spoke in regular tones, just with an unusual bitterness in them. Al stalked away first, and I was left looking around our new kitchen, a mix of our belongings scattered about, and wondered if I had just made a huge mistake. And worse, spent a whole lot of money on a move that I was just going to have to do in reverse.

It took about ten minutes for me to feel incredibly guilty. I hated thinking that I had made Al sad. The angry emotions had cleared, leaving way for more rational thinking, for memories of Al being nothing but good to me, for the recollection that Al really did wish to always make me happy. I peeked into the living room and saw him brooding over a book. The best way to show him that I was sorry, I decided, was to go finish up his work of unpacking boxes and starting the long and arduous process of figuring out where everything would go.

About a half hour later, Al walked into the bedroom, where I was busy trying to fit his duvet into my duvet cover (Al was not a classic bachelor in most senses, but when it came to certain things, I sometimes wondered if he'd really been raised by his mother at all. One of those things was in discovering that he didn't know the difference between a duvet and a blanket, and had lived for years with an uncovered duvet.) In case you've never tried it, fitting a duvet cover over a duvet is one of those things that make you question society's progress. If we can land on the moon, surely we can figure out a more efficient way for them to fit together. Anyway, it's nearly impossible to do single-handedly, and so I had approached the matching up of corners by crawling into the duvet cover and pushing the duvet into the edges of it, smoothing it out by wriggling around inside of it.