becoming {h.s} | {b2}

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

n. is it too dramatic if i start this off asking for comments because the numbers have been going down recently and i miss reading your thoughts? lmk

— CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT —

october, year three.

From time to time, I spend the night at Harry and Kiera's. It's not frequent, and it's not for long periods of time. Usually, I wouldn't even call it premeditated. It will start with an invitation to come over for dinner. We'll end up drinking and, suddenly, I'm too drunk to drive back to Fitzy's. It will start with a proposition for a movie night and, suddenly, we've watched four and I'm too tired to drive myself back to Fitzy's. Most nights, I'll crash on the couch instead of showing myself up to what I still will occasionally regard as my room. It still feels like my room. I wonder if it will ever feel like anything else. Staying on the couch seems less permanent. More: I'm a guest in your house, you set the rules.

Last night was slightly different.

Fitzy picked up an on call shift at the hospital and I just knew that today was not exactly the kind of day in which I wanted to be alone. Rationally, I know that I've done more healing than I can even put into words in the past two years. Thinking about Harriet doesn't hurt. Somewhere along the line it felt less like a life lost and instead, she began to feel more like an angel gained. She doesn't dictate my every move anymore. Relatively speaking, I think I've made peace. Things happen every day that are beyond my control. The best that I can ever hope for is the ability to make peace with what I cannot control.

That being said, this is the first time that I would be truly alone to deal with these things. Even though last year was something of an enigma—starting with Will's forgetting of the date—we eventually got to the point in which we collapsed in each other's arms and just mourned unapologetically. This time around, things are different. I have no husband who knows my loss and my roommate is leaving me on my own. Of course that's not his fault. I told him to. I wanted the space to be by myself but that's not entirely right, either. I wanted the space away from him—not from people. Realistically speaking, I wanted Harry's company. He, more than anyone aside from Will and myself, knows the loss that I felt on that day.

So I found myself at Harry's door, drenched in rain fumbling with a stack of keys that I couldn't sort through in the dim lighting from the street lights a ways off. Harry told me to let myself in—he was on his way home from work and would beat me there. Kiera is back home visiting for a cousin's confirmation. In the past two years, I'm not the only one who has changed. Kiera has, too. Over the past two years, her religious affiliations have wavered, though have returned to something of their original glory. The kind where she wakes up early on Sunday mornings to go to mass and where she holds a prayer before every meal and says a quick one before going to bed. At least, so Harry tells me.

It doesn't make sense to either of us, not really. I wasn't raised religious and neither way Harry. Organized and institutionalized religion doesn't exactly seem to be my cup of tea. Of course, I'm not necessarily knocking it. Part of what makes the human race so unique is their ability to believe in different things with a sense of certainty. It's not my place to tell Kiera that she is right or wrong to believe in the Christian God that is expressed in the Bible. Though, it is my place to know that's not for me. Personally, I prefer to believe in the science of life. Not that there isn't something beautiful about the notion of a God that created all of life... but, it's just not for me. Believing in something so blindly does not make sense to me.

When finally I let myself in, I had a moment of just staring around the house; one of those moments where the way that life could have been is staring you right in the face.