The Last 0.38%

“People think I’m lying when they hear this.” Or sometimes you’d open with, “People never believe this is the truth when I first tell them.” But you weren’t lying; it was your truth. It was a chapter (or several chapters, depending on how things are organized) of your life, your beautiful life, before you introduced yourself to me.

For entirely different reasons, my chapter about you would begin the same way and carry on with lots of difficult-to-believe truths stacked in a row. Any sensible person would be skeptical of even my first claim that the night we met – perhaps within just an hour or two of the first time we spoke, while getting ready for dinner out alone, I noticed myself rushing. There was no apparent reason for the urgency, but it was so palpable that I questioned it: why do I feel I have to get to Guido’s tonight and why am I hurrying?

A logical person would say I brought that inexplicable urgency and unidentified expectation with me to the barstool where I dined. Perhaps. But you spoke first. I sat minding my own business editing an essay I started that morning in which I had written these lines:

I can’t fathom how people handle facing their mortality. How people prepare to let go of the sweetness of soil and water and sky and leaves. And books and words. How people say goodbye to their very own bodies.

I was keeping to myself when you leaned your head towards my shoulder and started talking, started listening, started thirty thousand other things in motion, all of which felt at once lovely and important and dangerous and irrevocably desirable. Neither of us, no one, would have ever guessed how close you were to dying.

Maybe this is why Genie’s March Living Out Loud writing prompt sends deep pains into my torso. She asks for our thoughts on destiny, how or if we think fate might have played a role in our lives. My answer to that question is this: give me a soundproof room so that I can scream at god until my vocal chords tear. And then leave me in there because I don’t have interest in much else any longer.

Still, if I could go back to that night, the night I felt propelled to Guido’s, and walk past it down the road for seared tuna and sake instead thereby setting in to motion an entirely different future, one without your first uninvited kiss, without my choice to be reckless, without the bruise only we saw, without your death, I would not.

I would do it all over again because being with you was, what did we used to say? “It’s wonderful!” That and eleven or twenty seven other joyful exclamations I would give anything to hear you say again. Unless (unless, unless) the different-seared-tuna-sake-future was one where (never having known me) you could remain alive. Oh, if only you could remain alive, alive as the son, brother, uncle, friend, genius you were for the 99.62% of your days before I met you. If you could remain alive, that would be my utmost preference.

But I don’t think it works that way.

We don’t have a choice in this. And this is not a soundproof room nor is it my chapter about you, so I must wait until I can accept what has happened, and I must speak in polite tones, and I must try not to wound the living.

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