Thank Yous/Goodbyes

Sarah de Noyo
Nov 4 · 14 min read

I met a man who writes fiction. These are not hard to come by. I met a man who makes me want to write fiction. I am doing it all the time now, in bed, in the car when my face goes hot with a sudden onset of being scared to die. And oh, how I’d forgotten what fun the fine art of deceiving oneself can be. I haven’t granted myself permission to imagine a life without this in years. The privilege of momentarily distancing myself from the tick-tick-tocking of the sick girl clocking. The checking of the watch, is it time to remove myself from this person’s life yet? To nip this in the bud before it grows roots so deep we’d have to take the house out with it? You’ll know it’s too late when uprooting this mess means tearing the foundation apart, and each moment before then will feel too early. Ten more minutes, begging, negotiating, smashing a snooze button that’s just for looks — like the close door button on the elevator that’s attached to nothing. There is no way to stay in this place of suspended morbidity, where it is a far off thing and even the sound of his breathing at night, deeper than mine, couldn’t make me feel like it would be easier for him if I left in the middle of the night. This place is not looking for new residents. This place can only be conjured in dreams. This place dissipates by morning, try I might to cling to it, it is not possible to make it stay. If Cystic Fibrosis is drowning on the inside then this, this is what it is to starve. To be only alive until the moment you no longer are. This is food chewed, swallowed, tasted, only to have your body not know what to do with its’ nutrients. A malabsorption. This is life half wasted, this is twenty-five years of posture-wrecking weight on my shoulders. Knowing I have the power to keep them from a world of hurt. And didn’t I say I wanted the short straws? Yes, give them to me, better me than you.

You poked my ear holes. You said does this hurt? And you pushed your finger into my new piercing and I said ow! Yes! Laughing. And “it’s new.” “It is?” “Yes, oh my god, yes” “you just go stabbing peoples fresh piercings?” — can’t stop laughing. Protecting my ears. I tell you I was in the hospital and I wasn’t feeling like a person so I snuck out and I went to get a piercing and the guy talked me into getting my conch pierced because it was prime real estate. He made it seem like it would be a crime not to. And I was so happy to be out for the moment that I would have indulged any whim. If he had suggested nipple piercings, I’d have ended up with those.

And on this night, things felt so light and silly in ways I couldn’t have expected. I think this is the first time I’ve felt like more than a novelty in a long time. This is not something I knew I wanted. We laugh too much and, where did we find that lightness, where was it at before?

Later, your hand on my back. I bend towards you. This, is an offering for you. We are one fluid curve. What’s mine is yours, this flesh. But the fingers through the hair too. Arm-crux kisses, face smushed to shoulder, head on your chest, looking back — our books on the coffee table. Split right open down the middle, like my ribs splayed for you. Spatchcocked. Spine damned broken. Heart wide open. Your similies would work better as metaphors and your metaphors better as similies. Forget the rules you’ve smartly laid out for yourself — they’ve done their job and you forgot to toss them at their expiry date. Long spoiled. Something about being able to break the rules once you know them? And maybe if you allow yourself for long enough, you will stop conjuring the images of your dead friends’ unsmiling faces. You will stop feeling that to let people know you is to permiss a noose, tightening around your loved one’s neck. You may still feel the friction, the rope slithering in the slipknot, an aching to seize it in your palms — but this isn’t your decision to make.

We’re on the same side of a booth and I catch myself leaning my head into you, wanting to leave it there. Pulling me closer, your weight on mine. And I told myself it is okay to want this, remembering, you don’t get to decide for other people what it is they can handle. I say to myself just be here now, enjoy the space between his arms. Minutes into this pretend world void of impending doom and I’ve got to piss, and I am scared to go alone and for good reason. Just as I’m washing my hands, grief creeps up behind me and it says to me, “are you sure you want to do this to him?” And I say “no, that’s why I asked you to sit at a different table, to quit looking at me so much, I’m trying something new,— “I’m, uh, I’m trying to date without you here, for once.” And I slip out of the ladies room, grief shaking its’ head slowly back and forth as the door swings shut behind me.

And thinking about it, it was the first time I wrote about these feelings for anyone but me. The Best Kind of Grief For The Dead is Gratitude. I think that’s what my essay was called. How funny it is that I was writing about the silent killer of my friends, my youth, my hope — but that my understanding of the world was yet so small that I still shoved these big thoughts into the confines of a Cosmopolitan article, the BEST. Top 10 Ways to Grieve Without Gaining Weight. But at this point, the world had only yet been good or bad. Really, I was writing How to Cope With the Loss of a Best Friend. How to take what he gave you and allow it to inspire you each day, but I didn’t have the words yet. How to spin silt into silk. To find the stories in plain sight. To see the little circles life makes. I wrote about him bringing roses backstage. How I didn’t recognize him under the white sheet without his smile, which took up half his face when he’d been living. I was writing how to float on with no wind in your sails. How to find your best friend in a world void of him. How to do something other than drive to California and sob on his grave, asking him to come home, taking only dirt-covered hands and knees back with you instead. What to do with the knowledge that grass hadn’t grown over his plot yet. This is when I first stopped liking God, and shortly after, stopped believing he existed.

Back then I was spending more time in a hospital bed than at home. High school was seven hours a day of unenthusiastically playing house — pretending I was one of you. Yes, I too am preoccupied with who’s dating who, being grounded my biggest disappointment, and will-I-get-an-A a colossal concern. Sometimes being in the hospital felt like a quick-witted purgatory. Blood pressure cuffs engineered to get tighter and tighter, squeezing out every last twinkle in my eye until I was in a catatonic state. I moved through the halls staring at a fixed point in space which nobody else could see. The corners of my mouth turned up into a smile when I’d overhear people my age complaining about the tiny, generically disappointing parts of life. On my good days, I was charmed at the witness of more common burdens. Will he text you later? Will your parents let you get the prom dress you love? Happy for you that these are the things which plague you, the thoughts which keep you up at night. That your lives had been quiet enough for these instances to be what truly threatens your happiness. In darker moments I was angry. Not knowing how to care, resentful — like these petite problems had anything to do with the magnitude of my own. My sublime isolation mistook for a collective burden.

It’s been a lifetime since then. I’m here now in the seventh year I didn’t expect to have. Sunday morning and rain is falling. But actually this time. For some reason, I’ve taken to singing that each morning when I wake up. Lobo chirps excitedly that I’m now awake and he can rub his face on my hand, gums first. (And isn’t it crazy that animals’ cries of excitement rise in pitch near the end too?) Today is actually Sunday and it is raining. A little stoned. Lit my new candle. Pointed the rainbow led plant bulb at a new plant. Drinking la Croix, alternating between peach-pear and mango. Made stir fry with fresh turmeric. I was going to go to the gym, but I started reading and couldn't put the book down. I’ve been sitting on the couch so into my book for long enough without moving to start to go numb. I’m stoned enough to not notice. It feels so good in my legs every time I move again after forgetting to. Cat wants out, I almost said no but then I said to him fine, you can go outside, and he immediately turned around and ran to push his face against the crack in the door. I said wait but let me give you a kiss first. I pick him up around the belly and go in for a kiss and he cries out and looks behind him. I laugh and then try with the other boy to the same response. And now I’m going to sit down again in the couch and warm my cold feet under this freshly cleaned, drier-warmed and fluffed blanket.

Life is vibrant. Even the drives home are filled with little insights. People seem more animated than they once did. The guy in the orange and black plaid shirt getting his things out of a Crown Victoria. He drops one thing when reaching for the next, and on and on again. The burger guy waving and doing finger guns at people who stopped for him as he made his way across the street. The couple going into an apartment building. This has to be one of their first dates. The first man is leaning against the door, looking around — pretending he isn’t. The second one shows up and they share a clunky hug, I can imagine the sound of their boots overlapping. I can’t tell which one is more excited, more nervous, they go in together. I imagine the second one that arrived will nervously stand in the entry of the other’s home, waiting to see what is appropriate in this personal space. Do we take off our shoes here? Hang our jackets? And then there’s a girl running to something and I can’t stop wondering what that something is. I am happy to be here. Stuck in traffic, sunset in the rearview mirror blazing like the end of a lit cigarette.

And then the other day, coughing up blood. Left the house anyway. Lined my lips in red, beating the blood to the punch. The power of red lipstick. This is one of the first times I’ve felt comfortable in tight clothing without not eating for an entire day, possibly in my entire life. I’ve always believed I didn’t have an eating disorder because I haven’t been committed to starving or depreciation of any sort — but I think I’ve been desperate in other ways. Punished myself. Wouldn’t leave the house. I’m walking tall. Full. Okay. Okay, okay, okay with it. There’s a guy looking at me in the audience. We are at the dive bar show and my food comes out, thank god, right when it starts. I know the guy in the band, the one who coddles his dog. I don’t know him that well but he makes me hate my ex.

This music is computer noise and the idea of dancing cats, yes, actually. German is calculating how many times in this 15-minute set he can appropriately leave for a cigarette. I spell out this is bad in the ketchup, through the sound, because this is bullshit is too many letters for the small space I’ve made on the greasy checkerboard paper. We laughed about deviated somethings. Too much cocaine up your ass. Who knows. I love these people. Being a part of this. The laughs from the belly rising to the ceiling like hot air. Nineteen people outside smoking. I lick the ketchup off my middle finger from caulking the fries. A man who looks like a Portland Ron Swanson says there was a spotlight on me, “how funny! Literally.” He says ‘literally’ five or six times in talking about it. I say thank you.

There were so many things I once thought impossible. As a kid, I remember my concession that there was no way to clean a glass table or a windshield without getting Windex in your eyes. I remember thinking I could never possibly drive because I cough so often that it would distract me. And the initial fear of can I even drive if I don’t break five-foot? And will I break five-foot? One day things snapped into place and I realized I could spray the towel instead of trying to squirt upward and having it rain down on me in a fine acrid mist. And consequentially, each and every other obstacle that seemed to be a dead-end of impossibility has one day clicked and receded from my daily conscious thoughts forever. This is what I mean when I say that things come out in the wash. What once felt like a meteor crashing through your world, as time moves forward and your universe expands, becomes an imperceptible blip on the flash-bulb blurb of life.

And there’s a woman later, outside The Conquistador, she says she would never be caught without a cigarette. Eleven people are smoking outside, four more hold them as props, ready. Something to hold, someone to be. I watch from twenty feet upwind, waiting for the brightly lit ends to die out, in the small window before they reach for another. When I was standing with them, I tried to breathe from above us. Tragedy of the commons, I think. This air was for everyone and now it is unusable. Doesn’t do it for me. Doesn’t work. Nick says he doesn’t know how I can stand it for as long as I do, and I don’t know how I do either.

And here we are, smack-dab in the middle, years from what should be the finish. I have survived now more times than I can count. All the people I’ve almost died with. We always end up in the same place. I am saying sorry, it’s okay, and I warned you, and no I cannot promise you I won’t die, I cannot assure you I’m here to stay. How I used to tell them, that is a promise I can’t make, and how I promised them anyway. I’ve imagined in these moments, it is me under there, looking out from under the white sheet — and have you ever watched a human spring a leak? That’s what it is like. When they start to see what you’d meant when you said do not fall in love with me, not if you’d like to be happy ever again afterwards. And they say what do you mean afterwards? And I say after, you know what I mean you can’t possibly still believe that we get better, can you? I let you hope for this long but Santa never was real, and I was never going to survive. Here we are. Are you happy now? And each time we find ourselves here I remember the naive desire to have this life of mine understood.

But there’s no going back from there, no getting your joy back when you realize the person you love is really dying, that it’s not just a for now thing. And I want for them a life that still includes the hope I washed my hands of so long ago. I promise I will have mercy on those lucky enough to not know better, to not let them get their hands sticky with this shit.

Life has started over since then, I’ve been true to my word. I’ve made friends I cry with every time we speak. I am full to the brim. But then comes the hand-holding. The versions of love that make me panic. Hands tracing down my spine. And I think I don’t want to do this to you, no no no not again. No, we all deserve the kind of people who stay alive. Calamari kisses with no end in sight. But I get nervous when I feel for people. Even a little bit. It is ten years later and I’m still finding new ways to grieve. The time I watched my own limbs fail me like in a dream, felt life dwindling. The vibrance of mine — it went nowhere. Dissipated right into the atmosphere, waved goodbye, you don’t get to keep it. You will start to forget my face and you will hate yourself for it. I was sorry to have drawn these people in. A siren in the sea. I want to decide for the people I love to not be a part of this life. But it is not my decision, I tell myself this. It can’t always be up to me. But shouldn’t I tell them? A full gale warning urging fishermen to turn back. It may not be only me who drowns out here.

So I took my own advice, I said it’s okay and you are allowed to want the same things as other people. To feel warm in more ways than one. But it’s still not something that belongs to me. Hours in and I start coughing, can’t sleep. Just because I didn’t take my pills. I am Cinderella and how did I forget my dress would turn to rags at the stroke of midnight? These things are not for me, no, I am already here on an extension, back out for one last song. And that first night grief had snuck in under the door without my knowing — playing marbles on the kitchen floor and I said fine, okay, just please don’t wake him up, he doesn’t know I brought you with me, and — where did you find those marbles? And the moments where you try to live in this fantasy, close your eyes next to him, staying over a second and third time. Fluffing his pillows in the morning. You catch your own reflection and grief says what do you think you’re doing? He’s happy in this life, before you, he hasn’t even heard deaths thunderclap. And this version of me, tucking his bedsheets in, flattening them. She says what do you mean, look, I stayed the night, and nothing bad has happened yet. And grief says, hands on hips, honey, darling, my precious grim reaper, who do you think you’re fooling? Look closer. Look. You bring death with you wherever you go. Do you want this for him? You’re buying time, your head isn’t right and, last night, didn’t you hear me rapping at the door? While you were up here pretending? Playing along? Yes, I remember. I told you to go away. That I’m trying not to think that way. And then, well, I left in a hurry. And grief, it was waiting, leaning up against the tree outside, I tried to avoid eye contact. And Grief said to me, “what were you doing up there, all night? I tried to come in with you and you shut the door in my face, ha ha, must’ve been an accident, don’t ya think? Next time I’ll come with you, it was cold out here.” I say look, “I know we’ve done everything together for a long time now but I think it’s time we don’t — anymore.” And for a moment I think that this is a choice I have the power to make. I say I don’t care if you’re cold, I don’t care if you die, just leave me alone! I say that the girl upstairs is right, didn’t you see him? His life? He is happy not knowing. He is happy in his world where the people he loves are not dying. Where this shadowy memory of mortality only comes through in minute glimpses, some made-up one-in-a-million shit out of luck future, after swerving the car just in time with his kid in the backseat, after someone that someone else loves dies their distant, horrible death. People like him taste grief when they witness it in others’ lives. “Stay away from him!” I say. Stay far away. And grief reaches out for me, crunching leaves and following close behind. Why are you still here? Grief looks up at me, shaking its’ head and says, darling, you know that we are a package deal. You have always known that where you go, I go. Are you going to say goodbye to him or from now on let me in?

Sarah de Noyo

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Oversharing highly personal experiences on the internet since 2006

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