20. Kamryn
“It’s in the quiet I miss you most. When my mind has the chance to wander and my heart has a moment to remember.”
-Lola Lawrence
As the phone falls from my hand, my body goes numb as countless memories of us together fly through my mind. Every memory in chronological order. To our first meeting. To puberty changes. To both of us celebrating each other getting our licenses and then our first cars. To graduating high school and going to college together. To falling in love. To the last time I walked away.
Is it all gone? Are we no longer able to create new memories? Ones where we loved loud and forgave with quiet whispers and sneaking kisses. Is it really all gone? To the future I thought we’d have. To the love that I had hoped would last our lifetime.
The hope that I carry tries to say lit. I try to stay hopeful.
But the hope dims out as I pray to whoever is listening that this is all a bad dream. That I’m going to wake up. That Liam is going to be the one to call me.
But all of the hoping and praying slips through my fingers as I see Emily barely holding on. Her sobs overtaking her body as the realization that her fiancée is gone.
I don’t remember the drive in the car or the walk up to the hospital. As the memories of us refuse to stop playing as a montage.
I don’t remember anything as the doctor tells us they didn’t make it. My crumbling to the floor as the life I had imagined with the boy I’d known since I was seven is ripped from my grasp. The hope that I carried is snuffed out with the realization that this is the reality I’m living. As the tears that I hoped would stop just fall faster as time ticks on.
I don’t remember Jax coming to pick Emily and I up from the hospital and taking us back to my house. Silent sobs wrack my body as the soul deep ache of losing the other part to your being starts to sink in.
I don’t remember any of it. I don’t want to remember any of it.
It’s as if a stunt double played me while I looked on. Even though I lived it. I have the emptiness inside of me to prove it.
Five days pass me by. I lived but I didn’t exist. Because I knew that as this day approached, existing would be the last thing on my mind.
There is a light knock on my door as Jax sticks her head inside my bedroom. My sister and Sarah have been my saving grace through it all.
“Kam it’s almost time to go,” Jax announces from my closed bedroom door.
I’m in a motionless state. I don’t remember anything that’s happened in the last week. I don’t remember waking up or getting dressed for the funeral. And I don’t even remember the drive to the church where the funeral is being held.
“I’ll be right here the whole time,” Jax tells me as she holds my hand and leads us to sit near Liam’s family.
I wish I could hit the rewind button to last week. How has it only been five days? It hits harder the closer and closer we get to our seats. I just want to go back. To when I didn’t give him that ultimatum. Where I made him tell me his reasoning for breaking his promise. Where I just gave him more time. Time to prove to me that we weren’t just settling into a domestic partnership. Time to realize that we could’ve had it all. Time is ungraspable at the moment when your whole world is crumbling down around you.
Time and the what if crush me as I realize that at the end of the day, none of it truly mattered.
As I sit in the church with trembling lips and silent tears running down my face; I can’t help but hate myself for the way that I handled things with Liam. Maybe he was more fragile than I thought. Maybe he was suffering from depression. How could I have not seen it?
I wanted to be a psychologist for crying out loud! The self-hatred for myself that I couldn’t see his struggles, slaps me in the face. I should have seen it.
I failed him.
I feel like I have this giant Liam-shaped hole in my heart at what I lost with him. All that Liam’s family had lost.
The reverend talks about how precious life is. And how every day on this earth is a gift that should never be wasted.
As we get to the cemetery and settle in our seats, family members of his whom I never met tell stories of a boy who was nowhere close to matching what they described about him. Liam’s parents were looking at me expectantly when it was time for me to give the last speech. Jax gives my hand a reassuring squeeze before I stand up and walk to the front.
“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
–Leo Tolstoy
I close my eyes to steady my heart and calm my breathing. I muster up every bit of strength that I can to spill the words that only sound right on paper.
“When I thought about funerals, I’ll admit I pictured this happening in seventy years. I would tell stories of Liam. The life we lived. The children we had. The love we lived for. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be talking about our stories now.” I begin as my eyes begin welling up with tears.
“We first met in the second grade. I made him sit next to me because he was the new kid in class. We soon bonded over anything and everything that seven year olds could bond over. Bugs, who could be the first to the monkey bars at recess, who could throw a baseball the furthest…to who could get their drivers license first. From elementary school to high school, we spent all of our free time together. Our parents couldn’t separate us.” I look at Liam’s parents with a shaky smile on my face.
“From the time we were seven years old, we were inseparable. Our parents teased us about getting married. And when you’re seven years old and a girl, boys have cooties. It was just the rule when you were a kid. But as we got older I noticed slight changes and then in college I stopped seeing him as a boy with cooties.” I look up to the sky knowing that Liam is looking down. My smile is strained as I do everything I can to keep the tears from falling.
“My, oh my how our parents were right. Even though Liam frustrated me to no end, I knew in the end that he was the one for me. He helped put me back together when I never thought I’d be whole again. But unbeknownst to me, I couldn’t do the same for him.” My voice cracks as the tears I’ve tried with all of my might to keep from falling, end up falling in rivers down my cheeks.
“I never thought I’d have to say goodbye to the love of my life and best friend at twenty-five. I never thought I’d say goodbye to him before we got engaged. I never thought I’d say goodbye to my best friend before we could grow old together.” I cover my mouth to suppress my sobs. “For almost twenty years he was the best part of my days. I never imagined I’d have to say goodbye to him at all. Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, thank you for raising an amazing young man. I’m so thankful that I was part of his and your lives, even if it was for a small part of it. Liam, a part of me wishes that I could just go back in time. I’d remember every single thing that we did together in detail. The last time we saw each other, I told you I loved you. I didn’t want that to be the last time. I just wanted more time.” I finish with tears falling in thick streams down my face.
With a breath of finality, I sit back down as the reverend says a few more heart-warming words. When it comes time, Liam’s casket begins lowering into the ground and my tears continue to fall faster than ever. The finality in this final goodbye hits me like a sledgehammer to the face. Sobs upon sobs escape from me. Crippling me from my upright position to hunched over in my lap. Jax pulls my body into hers as if she could take this pain away from me. But knowing that her efforts are futile. One-by-one, and in little groups, people grab handfuls of dirt and throw them onto the casket.
Goodbye my friend, my confidant, my other half, my everything.
Knock! Knock! Knock!
“Come on Kam, open the door!” Jax shouts from the outside.
After Liam’s funeral I continued to shut everyone out. I stopped functioning. I stopped living. My company which was just getting started was put on the back-burner. I’m surprised with myself that I’m still half-way functioning.
“Kam, it’s been a month. Open up…please?” Jax pleads with me.
You may be wondering why my sister doesn’t just use her key to come inside. Well, I took it off her key ring when she wasn’t around and she finally noticed. The last month has been hard on me. I carry a lot of guilt around. Not just for Liam’s parents, but for Emily and James. They didn’t deserve any of what happened. I spent the past month crying and wondering if there was something that I could’ve done.
“I’m unsure which pain is worse – the shock of what happened of the ache for what never will.”
-Unknown
A week later I hear a different voice pleading with me to open the door. One that I haven’t heard since the funeral. One I didn’t think I’d hear again. And for the first time in five weeks, I open my door. To my surprise there are two people I never expected to see again standing at my door.
“Hi Mr. and Mrs. Taylor,” I voice shakily. Tears that I thought had dried up, pool in my eyes and spill over.
“Oh, sweetie,” Mrs. Taylor somberly says and pulls me into a big hug. It was then that I let all of my tears go unabashedly. I just cried. For how long? I don’t know. Standing in the threshold of my house with the people that were a second set of parents to me.
After a few minutes we move to sit on the couch, when Mrs. Taylor breaks the silence. “I know what you’re going through sweetheart. And trust me, it has not gotten easier for us. But shutting out the world is no way to live, Kamryn.”
I look up in surprise as if she knew that’s what I was doing.
“Jax called us,” Mr. Taylor tells me with a shrug and wraps his arm around my shoulder and pulls me into his side. “And that’s not the way that Liam would have wanted you to live your life.”
I nod absentmindedly just to agree with him. The truth is, I don’t know what Liam would have wanted from me. I don’t even know what Liam wanted from himself.
Mrs. Taylor places a box she brought on the coffee table. “I was going through Liam’s room at the house and his apartment, and brought some things that you might want,” She tells me.
When I look up at her, her eyes have glassed over from unshed tears. Liam’s and my relationship was rocky but still stable. When I moved out, I had hoped with every fiber of my being that we could get back to the good place we were in before. It worked for a while. But then it didn’t. I have no clue where our paths diverged.
“You don’t have to open it now,” Mr. Taylor declares as they stand to leave. “Just know that our son loved you with all of his heart. And so do we Kamryn. You will always be a part of our family, the daughter we never had, even though he’s not around anymore.” With final hugs and kisses on the cheek, I see them to the door.
I walk over to the box that’s sitting on my coffee table, afraid of what I might find in it. Elbows perched on my knees and hands clasped under my chin, I stare at the box. “Liam you better not have any secrets.” I say out loud to myself. I open it up to find one of his ratty t-shirts that I always slept in, a couple of pictures in frames of us at our high school and college graduations and one of us at my last birthday before he died, a bottle of cologne that I loved when he wore it, and a black velvet box.
And like the moment when I received that phone call, time just stops. My body freezes until I have no choice but to let a sudden rush of air into my lungs. A choked sob comes out of me. With shaking hands, I open the lid to find a 1.5-carat engagement ring. I cry an earth-shattering cry. I cry for a man who did want to give me the world. I cry for what I lost and what I could have had with Liam. And I cry for all of the guilt that I still feel.
Grief is a funny thing. I shouldn’t say its funny. But it’s an unexpected feeling. Where you don’t know whether to cry buckets of tears. Or comfort those who are sobbing uncontrollably. Or yell into the void in hopes that this current situation you find yourself is just a bad dream you’ll wake up from.
Grief makes you feel things. It makes you uncover those long-forgotten emotions. Tapping into whatever pain that threatens to unweave your carefully structured life.
Grief seeps deep into your body until that’s all you know.
I don’t know how long I laid on my couch with tears slowly flowing when I heard the doorbell ring. When I didn’t answer it after a minute a soft knock followed.
“Kamryn. It’s Emily,” She announces softly from the other side of the front door.
I sit up and look at the door like it might explode at any second. When she knocks on the door again, I find myself standing up to open the door. With a final encouraging breath, I open the door and see Emily. And when I see her, the tears start all over again and I crumple in on myself. Emily comes in and closes the door before hugging me and crying for all that we’ve lost.
“I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault. I should’ve seen it.” I manage to say through choked sobs.
Emily shakes her head. “No it’s not Kam. You were not his fixer. You didn’t make Liam get into his truck. You didn’t make James follow Liam into his truck either. They were both their own people. Neither you nor I could have predicted that would have happened. Liam should’ve made the decision to get help on his own. You were not his caretaker. Again, you were not his fixer. You were only his girlfriend.”
I nod my head because I know she’s right, but that still doesn’t stop the guilt from nagging at me. I wipe my eyes with leftover tears before I say something to my friend. “That’s why I haven’t talked to you since it happened. I carry so much responsibility because you two were supposed to get married soon. And because of mine and Liam’s problems, that got taken away from you. I’m so sorry.” I say through a tight throat.
Emily shakes her head with tears in her eyes. “Stop apologizing. Yes, James was my soulmate and one true love. I’ll miss what I was supposed to have with him. And I don’t know if I’ll ever have that with someone else. But he wouldn’t want me wallowing in his loss. I know that he’d want me to live my life and be happy. I know Liam would want the same for you. So let’s move past this, Kam. We have to move past this. We’re both young, and it’s not going to be easy; but we can do it. Not just for them, but for us.”
For the last few months, I have been seeing my therapist on a consistent basis. It was hard at first for me to let out all that I was feeling about losing Liam. In my sessions I was either crying, or silent and watching the clock tick away; or my mind was just empty. My therapist thought that it’d be good for me to go and visit Liam’s grave. Tell him all that I had been telling her. That even though I might feel dumb for sitting and talking to a rock, that he’s actually listening. So that’s where I’m at now.
It wasn’t hard for me to find Liam. It’s weird, but even in death I’m drawn to him. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve known someone your whole life…have even loved them your whole life.
When I walk up to the grave I place some fresh flowers down. Nothing too girly because I know he wouldn’t like it. I look down at his grave for a few seconds and then take a seat in front of him.
“I know I should’ve come a long time ago. I just couldn’t. It’s been too hard on me. But I’m guessing you already knew that.” I take a cleansing breath to get my thoughts back in order. “I’ve been seeing our therapist again. Which has actually been good for me. She said that instead of me venting all of my frustrations out on you to her, I should just come to you. But isn’t that what therapy is for? They ask the questions, and I answer them?” I huff out a bitter laugh.
I look across the cemetery. The leaves sporadically, falling as if the dearly departed are sending silent messages to their loved ones on earth.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this Liam. We were supposed to grow old together. Be happy. Have kids and a marriage. A lifelong friendship. But you were just so damn selfish…ignorant. You refused to get the help you knew you needed. And you took your life and James’ life. You took Emily’s fiancé away from her. You took another family’s son and brother and grandson away from them.”
I take another shaky breath in before slowly releasing it. “I just wanted you to know that I’m so mad at you. I’m still mad at you. And I’m hurt. And angry. Why, Liam? Why did you think it would be so easy for me if you weren’t around anymore? Is it because you knew you couldn’t give me what I wanted? Because I have the ring you were going to propose to me with. How long were you going to wait? Did you not think I would have said yes? Did you not think you were good enough? I would have said yes. You knew this. You knew I wanted this with you. I loved you more than anything Liam. You put me back together when I thought I would have been broken forever.” I take a cleansing breath. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to yell at you. I do want to say that I will wear the ring. Your ring. It is everything I imagined it to be. I’ll wear it for as long as I can. And then I’ll be moving on. I need to try to move on. By letting you go. One day I’ll bring my kids here and tell them about you. I may even introduce you to my future husband. Although I know that’s a far way away now. I’ll love you forever Liam. Goodbye.”
Emily was right. The next few months were not easy in any way. In fact, the rest of the year was anything but easy. I got through the hardest period of my life. It was a slow start, but I did it. I buried myself in restarting my company. Sarah and Jax made sure to be there for Emily and me whenever we needed them. I haven’t talked to Liam’s parents since they came to my house that day all those years ago. And I’ll admit that things got pretty dark for a while.
I wore the engagement ring that Liam picked out for me for about a year afterward. But when I was talking to my therapist, she suggested that it wasn’t healthy. But that I shouldn’t rush moving on like that. When I finally took the ring off, I had an emergency session with her. I figured she’d be better to go to than to go to a bar; which I still did.
I still have periods of time when I just lock myself in my house and cry. I’m told that’s normal.
During that grieving period, my therapist told me to find joy in what I love to do. Fashion was my one outlet years ago, so she said that putting my grief and work together may help. And it did. With the endless encouragement from my family and friends, my brand took off. I named it Ry&Co., which is what Liam used to say when my sorority sisters and I would go anywhere together. It’s a bit like having him with me.
But for now, I’m still riding the high of finishing my third New York Fashion Week. I’m hearing great things about the line from critics, but now it’s time to start putting the finishing touches on my spring line for its debut.
They say that time heals old wounds. But what about the new wounds? Or what about the old wounds that never truly healed? They just had a layer of tissue paper on them. I always knew that time and love were finicky things. I just never knew how finicky.