Two Graves
You can’t go back.
But knowing a thing and living inside it are different.
You can know something is impossible yet still wish for it.
You can beg to go back. You can stand in your father’s kitchen at midnight with your hands flat against the cold floor and beg the universe to rewind eleven days, ten, nine, however many it would take to land you back in a version of May where everyone you loved was still where they were supposed to be.
Time does not beg with you. It just keeps doing the only thing it knows how to do, which is move, indifferent to what you want.
I used to think I understood time. I was wrong.
I thought it was a kind of currency, something you spent wisely or carelessly, and either way it ran out at the same rate for everyone.
I knew better now. Time does not spend. It pushes.
It gets behind you, both hands against your back, and it does not care whether you are ready to be moved.
Time is the bet. It is the only bet. And we always lose.
Time is the casino that pretends we have a chance of winning.
We are the stupid gamblers putting down everything we have.
You can refuse. You can stay still on purpose, plant your feet, grow roots so deep into the dirt that you tell yourself you have found a way to stop following time’s rules.
I had done that for days. I had stood so still in that house that I had half convinced myself stillness was its own kind of permanence, that if I just did not move, none of it would be allowed to finish happening.
If I did not acknowledge time, she would be stuck, too.
But staying still was never the same as going back. I understood that now, walking the route I used to walk barefoot at sixteen, my shoes loud against gravel that remembered me. Refusing to grow does not mean you get smaller. It just leaves you frozen, exactly where the stillness caught you.
I was frozen between two graves now. That was the truest way I knew how to say it.
One of those graves I had had eighteen years to grow around.
The angel did not surprise me anymore. I had built a relationship with that grief the way you know a mother who was alive, learned her patterns, her moods, knew the way she comforted me and knew the way she made me cry.
I made my peace with the fact that it would always be there and would never again be able to hold my hand.
The other grave did not know how to behave yet.
It had not settled. The dirt was still dark and disturbed in a way that looked wrong against the grown-over green around it, a fresh wound on a body that had otherwise finished healing.
I had not had eighteen years with that one.
I’d had days, and every one of them had been spent standing as still as I possibly could, trying to negotiate a return trip with a clock that had never once, in the history of clocks, agreed to that kind of deal.
You cannot undo the choices that were made for you.
I had not chosen this. I hadn’t chosen the eight months he spent not telling me, hadn’t chosen the Friday phone call I cut short, hadn’t chosen any single piece of the architecture that had built this exact night, this exact walk, this exact bottle clinking softly against my hip with every step.
Someone else’s choices had built the road.
All that was left to me was whether I walked it standing up or got dragged down it on my knees.
It is not fair to be pushed like this. I had said that to myself a hundred times. In the shower, in the dirt, in the silence of a kitchen built for three people that now held one and a couple ghosts. This was not fair. Fairness does not change the motion, though.
I reached the fence. A fault in the perimeter, standing open the way it always did at night, permanently unmended and ignored.
I slipped through, unworried about being turned away.
The dead kept different hours than the living and the groundskeepers had simply given up trying to enforce a curfew on either side.
I could not go back. Not to before the diagnosis, not to before the call, not to before any of the events that had reshaped me back into who I used to be, a tragically sad girl walking through this broken fence with a bottle of vodka tucked against my chest.
So, I went forward instead, because forward was the only direction time had ever actually offered me, and I let my feet carry me down the path I’d known since I was small enough to need someone’s hand to walk it, toward the place where both of my dead were waiting.
I saw the angel first. I always saw the angel first. White, patient, wings curved the same way they’d been curved for years. She looked less like a monument and more like something the earth had just grown, the way it grows trees, the way it grows anything given enough time and enough rain.
A few feet to her left, the ground was still wrong.
There was no statue. No headstone, just a long rectangle of dark, disturbed earth, slightly mounded.
It did look like a wound on a body that had otherwise finished healing, exactly the way I had prepared it for myself on the walk over.
Except seeing it in person was different from saying the sentence in my head.
The sentence had not prepared me for how a fresh grave looks next to an old one. How unfinished.
I sat down in the grass, right in the middle, because it felt like the only fair thing left.
The last thing I had any control over. The bottle came out of my jacket easier than it should have.
My hands knew the motion, the twist of the cap, the angle to tilt my wrist so the burn hits the back of my throat instead of the front.
I had not done this in three years. My body had kept the choreography filed away regardless, the way it keeps how to ride a bike, and how to survive things it was never supposed to have to survive twice.
The first sip of vodka tasted like sixteen.
Like cigarettes I did not have anymore and a version of me that used to sit exactly here, except back then there had only been one grave to talk to.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, aloud, into the dark because it felt strange not to. “This is new. I don’t really know how to do two of you at once.”
The angel didn’t answer. She never did and she never would.
That used to be the whole point of her, the reason a sixteen-year-old girl could tell her things she couldn’t tell anyone breathing, because stone doesn’t flinch, it doesn’t pity, and it doesn’t ask follow-up questions you’re not ready for.
I took another sip and let my eyes drift toward the raw ground beside her.
“And you,” I said to my father, the words coming out rougher than I meant them to. “You could have just told me. Eight months, and not once. You let me sit across from you eating those stupid potatoes thinking we had time, and you already knew exactly how much we didn’t have.”
The anger came up fast after that, faster than I expected, faster than it had at the funeral, where it had been mixed with grass and dirt and Austin’s hand on my back.
This was cleaner. Just me and the bottle and two dead parents, and the feeling I had been circling since the dirt-throwing and had not let myself land on directly until right now, alone, with nobody around to soften it for me.
It was not really about Tom, the anger. Or it was not only about him.
It reached backward, the way grief always seemed to in me, finding the oldest wound in my soul and pressing on it first. I thought about Jax.
I did not choose to, or want to, but my mind led me there.
I hadn’t thought about him properly in weeks, not since the funeral, not since I had been too busy being a ghost.
But sitting here, between two parents who had both run out of time to finish loving me correctly, I found myself furious at the boy who had stolen years of time. Years of my time that I never got to spend learning what safety even felt like before he decided I did not deserve it.
“You took something,” I said, and I didn’t know anymore if I was talking to him, or to the dirt, or to nobody, or everybody.
“You took the version of me that could have just been sad about my dad. Just sad. Instead, I have to carry it through you first. Everything goes through you first. Even this. Even in my own father’s death, somehow, you are still in the room. ”
I drank again. The bottle was a third gone now, the burn duller, the edges of the cemetery starting to go soft and fuzzy at the corners.
I don’t want it to be permanent, this collision of Jax in my thoughts.
Lucy had spoken once, a thousand years ago, in a different conversation, about a different kind of permanence.
The past does not work like I wanted it to. You can’t just leave it there.
I hated that she was right. I hated that grief did not wait politely, did not wait its turn, did not let me bury one man without first making me remember everything the boy with kind eyes and bad hands had taken from me.
I hated that even now, at twenty-one, in a graveyard that held both my parents, some part of my mind was still doing math about a person who would never again get to touch any version of me, real or remembered.
The anger did not resolve. I want to be honest about that, even now, even after.
It did not crest and break and leave me lighter the way television promises healing is supposed to work.
It just sat there, unfinished, the way most of my anger always had, waiting for somewhere to go that I hadn’t built yet.