I didn't want to tell Matt about it. Not until I've gotten the part on the show. Sometime during my Fei Cheng Wu Rao application process, Matt left for Brazil. Flew to Rio. I drove him to the airport at 4:30 in the morning, and we were both sad. I gave him a mystery collection of goodies, sealed in a blue box. Only to be opened on his birthday. We stood for a long time outside the security gate before he went inside.
Then I drove home alone, and waited for the I-miss-him-quake to hit me and start crying. But I felt OK. I felt fine. I fell asleep as the sun came up, to the symphony of morning traffic and orange light seeping through my eyelids.
A few days after Matt had left, I attended a writers' meetup at the library for the very first time. I didn't really know what people did at writers' meetups, but I was thrilled privately just to be there – a nice change from my regular days of hermitude in the cave.
Because these are writers, we started things off with a writing prompt. Writing prompts are warm-up exercises that get your juices flowing, kicking off with phrases like: "My guilty pleasure is..." We'd set the timer for five minutes, and scribble down whatever comes to mind. TIMED anything has a tendency to make me mildly panicky, because I don't know what's going to come out the other end in five minutes. Generally it's an ugly baby. And I hate sharing ugly with anybody.
And the topic of the day was (if you will kindly dig this): Imagine your death.
My first reaction was: Gee that's an ominous topic to start things off on a sunny afternoon. My second reaction was: Blank. To be honest, I'd never imagined my death. So the next thing that came to mind was – of course, Titanic.
Rose was lying on the floating door whispering, "I love you Jack." And Jack gripped her hands in his, "Don't you dare say your goodbyes. Listen Rose, you're gonna get outta here. You're gonna go on. You're gonna make lots of babies and you're gonna watch them grow. You're gonna die an old, old lady. Warm in her bed. Not here. Not this night."
Inspired, I thought a lovely way for me to die would also be an old lady, warm in her bed.
So I wrote:
I would die an old lady, warm in her bed. Cradled in the arms of her husband. The sun is setting and the sheets are white. There would be no sorrow. Just peace. And the gratitude for having shared her life with this man.
When I read this passage to the group, everyone let out in unison: "Awww..."
Then one middle-aged lady shot back, "Clearly you've never been married before!" We all laughed.
She had written: "On a rainy day in Paris, I would shoot myself with a gun."
The paragraph she shared was wonderfully written, and we all took it as a joke of course. But jokes are only funny because they are half in jest. The other half is grounded in truth. Maybe some marriages do make people want to shoot themselves in the head with a gun.
I never romanticized or fervently anticipated marriage as a girl, despite having grown up in a healthy marriage. Some say marriage is love's tomb. I find that sentiment depressing, but haven't developed much of an opinion on "marriage" as a topic to counter the argument. I'd never imagined the dress, the wedding, or marrying anyone in particular. Not that I was actively against it, it just wasn't a topic that interested me. For the most part, I enjoyed being single. Why tie yourself down to one person, when you can experience your infinitude?
So it hit me like a rock when I pictured the death scene, and the old man holding me was, well... Matt.
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