memoir by
AUTUMN GREMAL
The tires fill out the gentle divots in the asphalt as it coasts through the night, headlights piercing darkness and red light illuminating the intersection and all of its shadows. Coyotes calling from the nature preserve holding our darkest secrets in a shroud of birch trees, thistle, and cattails. Her last words spoken to me, as the very person I could confide in… “don’t call an ambulance.” Well I did, your daydream death vision haunted me for years, rolling around the concrete, gravel indentations in my freckled skin. Don’t leave me to grow up on my own. A vulnerable and pathetic lament uttered through tears to my neighbor from down the road. She left me there as her eyes glazed over, looking at the shimmering popcorn spackled ceilings.
It hurt worse when I saw her for the first time in two weeks, recovering from comatose. I slept in that cold, sticky-leathered hospital recliner and held her trembling hands as she woke sweating in the night. Loneliness draped over me like a chivalrous lover’s suit jacket near a campfire and carried us both away in separate directions like a sweeping river. Some say that she never surfaced after the undertow pulled her down. That light was absent from her eyes for a long time, I don’t think even the sight of her own flesh and blood could cure that sick absence of soul that plagues a survivor of an attempt on one’s own life. Only now had it occurred to us just how thinly intertwined our mortality was with our physical selves, just as these thoughts filled in the empty spaces of silence in between every sentence.
Not many of us have the strength to carry the weight of that around. She was dragging a four headed hydra around on a chain leash with a suitcase of bricks thrown over her bony white shoulder every day of her life.
I could see it in her eyes, just for a second she would burn bright and snuff out. It was so easy. So easy to lose her and so hard to get her back. In an instant, she was taken from me.
Separated like continents, and we were on opposite sides. Oceans spread between us and cliffs torn jagged like daggers and teeth dispersed across the crooked plains. The hills chomped at my feet like wolves and most days I wish they ate me whole. No compensation for distance.
Our snake tongues carved out scenes in limestone with every word and we braced for bad news at every waking hour of the darkest and most fatigued nights. Her love was a vivacious plume of life and warmth that wrapped me like a blanket and held me as I drifted into lucidity in my dreams and woke me to the barcodes of light stretched across my beige walls. Rise and shine, stand strong against the waves and never give in. Her vermilion wrists scarred over and left only warped flesh in place of her past. She vanquished her demons and they kept coming back but we prayed this would be the last time that her eyes traced the details that the doctor had written in marker on the dry erase board bolted to the hospital room walls.
A little more of her would crumble off every time like the edge of a cliff that had weathered away piece by piece.
We all pray for a day in which she’s whole again and most accept that that day will never come.
I know that there will come a time when she forgets my face and not long after that she’ll forget my name. I’m just terrified of when her face stops lighting up like the soft glow of a nightlight owned by a child afraid of the dark—afraid of the absence of her warmest gleam. I miss the days in which I needed her more than she needed me.