eight-track

viii. naked as we came

naked as we came

            || iron and wine ||

            My favorite times with her were the early mornings, when neither of us had to go to school or work and we could just lay in bed all day and kiss and sleep. It was so cozy there, underneath her grandmother’s quilt, and we could pretend that we’d never have to leave and that I didn’t have cancer lying dormant in my body, ready to strike and take me away. It’s a little different with diseases; you know you’ll die but you don’t know when. Everything sort of hangs in limbo, and time is so precious but the days still go by like normal.

            Neither of us would have showered from the night before, and we smelled like sweat and bodies and her perfume from last night. She never washed off her makeup, and it surrounded her eyes in dark smudges. She was so pale, she looked like a ghoul when I woke up in the morning and saw her sleeping there. The eyeshadow always made it look like her eyes were sunken in, and I would always be so scared for a moment, until I realized that’s how she must feel every moment of every day. I considered leaving, just to take the stress from her, but I’ve read almost every sick little cancer story and I know that it would never go well. Either a) I would get too lonely and die or b) she would never move on with her life.

            I remember one morning she woke up, her eyelashes fluttering, and she said the strangest thing.

            Charles, if I die before you, don’t put me in the ground. You know how claustrophobic I am. Spread my ashes in the park or somewhere, just not the graveyard.

            I told her that was a really funny thing to say since we both knew that I’d die before her, and she put a finger to my lips to hush me. I’m glad she said that though, because it came in useful after the accident.

            Have you ever felt that kind of love and trust where you just want to go inside the other person? I mean, not really physically, but just hide yourself in them and be safe. It’s sorta hard to explain unless you’ve felt it, and I felt it with her, that feeling of just wanting to be one person and never separate.

            Her mom called while I was in the hospital to tell me. Rachel had been in a car wreck, don’t you know, a damn car wreck. She was in a taxi coming home from seeing me and the cab got hit real hard just where she was sitting. They wouldn’t even let anybody see the body, no matter how many times I told them I didn’t care to see her like that. She was still Rachel, and I wanted to bury my head in her stomach and hold her hand and just cry. I know she died because she hit her head real hard, and she couldn’t have looked that bad, but they wouldn’t let me see her.

            Do you know how much that sucked? I felt guilty for three whole months, until I finally called her mom and we talked about it for three hours. She didn’t blame me for being in remission, but Rachel had died because of it. If I’d just off and died the day before, she wouldn’t have been coming home from the hospital at that hour.

            Anyways, I told them what she’d said to me and they had her cremated. It made me so desperate to have her turned to ashes, so that not even a single cell of her existed anymore, but it’s what she wanted. Her parents gave me half the urn and they spread their half down at Coney Island, where she’d always loved to go when she was a child.

            Eventually, my doctor and the psychiatrist who was doing my grief therapy so I wouldn’t off myself let me go home. It was lying on the kitchen counter—she was lying on the kitchen counter like she’d done so many times before when we were playing around, except this time she was in a jar. It was a kind of ugly jar too.

            I spread her in the garden, where we’d had that failure of a victory garden two summers ago and made love under the stars. When I got done, I thought what the hell do I do with this ugly-ass jar now?

            I knew I couldn’t throw it away or sell it in a yard sell, because who wanted to buy a jar that once held someone’s dead lover? I planted lavender in it, her favorite flower, and set it on our bedroom windowsill, because it was still our bedroom.

            I took it with me to the hospital this time so I wouldn’t be lonely. I figure I’m probably gonna die soon, so I tucked an envelope with my last requests in the side of it. They’re real simple.

            Spread my ashes around the yard. Oh, and take care of this damn plant.