1. Grief can be described as a (bouncing) ball in a box*. The box also holds a button that when pressed releases pain. At the start, the ball is very large, practically filling the entirety of its container—a perpetually triggering torment. As time passes, the ball becomes smaller, contact with the button is less frequent, though the potency of pain remains unchanged. No matter how small the ball becomes, it will eventually make its mark at the heart of your grief. My first encounter with this analogy brings ball to button like metal to magnet. My grief the pressure-ache of their collision in my chest cavity.
*Analogy as seen on a post by Lauren Herschel on Twitter.
2. Dirt sits in the cup of my hand; I do not register the weight of it. The way I did not register most of your funeral. I saw your lovely face propped up on an easel next to the closed casket but could not imagine the lifeless equivalent contained in coffin. Could not picture the disaster of your being that led your parents to decide to seal you up inside so no one else would have to see it. But now that I must place this handful of earth onto the lid I cannot let go. The dirt I release, but not you. Please, I need to see her, as my hands grip at the slip and shine of polished wood. Please, as your mother’s arms encase me. Or else I won’t believe it. She simply says, You have to let go. And I do. Because she did. Because I had to. But I can’t tell you how long it took me to believe you were actually in there, and now under earth. To believe you hadn’t walked out of the wreckage and kept walking, hurt and confused, wandering into some general hospital some towns over. The way it happens in the novelas I watched from the foot of my mother’s bed. Maybe I still don’t. Maybe you’re still walking.
3. For a whole year after the accident I could not drive down the strip of road where it happened. Not more than a mile from my home. The first time I did surprised me because nothing terrible transpired. It wasn’t until I passed the serene scene that once held your crumpled car that a tightness clutched my sternum. A stitch in my lungs at each shallow inhalation, a thread of tension looping lobes once and again, the way I had circled these roads in search of you that night. Again, and again. I never found you. By the time I came across the crash they told me you were gone. The way all evidence of the crash is gone. Your mother didn’t want a memorial roadside marker. No white cross with ribbon or roses. But I remember.
4. What I do not avoid is the cemetery, but visits feel hollow. Every time I pass, I wish it was a place I could really find you. Not a place in which I most acutely feel your absence. For a while, night visits are common. I pour out pitiful prayers at your heart-shaped gravestone, the one I selected, but feel no connection— nothing but the cold of the ground beneath me seeping up into my skin. An emptiness between my ribs to match the emptiness I still envision within the wooden walls of the box below.
5. It is not infrequent that I pass a body in some state of damage and decomposition along the roads near my home. It is at least every week if not near daily. This dog, however, was unique in its complete decapitation. Head either crushed in one go or chipped away incrementally. And I’ll never not think of your cousin’s astonishment at the amount of visible roadkill down here. The longevity of the bodies on our South Texas caliche. In Chicago, he says, they don’t last an hour. Here we can witness their dismemberment, their deconstruction. Piece by piece. And vivid visions—hostile takeover of my nervous system— conduct tension and torsion to my neck, the sanctum of my stockpiled stress. Pulling the dome of my shoulder to the ball at the base of my skull.
6. Sometimes when I drive down University Drive, I remember following you to and from school, passing cars in tandem, the thumbs up you gave me out your driver’s side window at smooth lane transition, the top of your head just visible above the back glass. Your kerchief threshed and lively in the breeze. Sometimes I see a car like yours, less and less often as they go out of fashion, and swallow the urge to follow. A dry bolus lodged at notch of throat that brings constriction to my breathing.
7. The make-up scene in the movie about the best friends makes me cry. It wasn’t so much the plot—we never did anything that crazy—but the relationship. Two teenage girls on the precipice of transition to the phase we were in when I lost you. Their rallying ritual, the back-and-forth flattery, flamboyant affirmations of appearance. The way you talked about me to me. Hello, gorgeous—your greeting even on, especially on, those down days of roll-out-of-bed existence. The only one who made me believe my beauty. Who else just loves you like that? Chooses you like that? These friends fight, but they still have each other, even after making mistakes, even after making choices taking them to different continents for the coming year. I’d take the distance of oceans, other worlds, a separation of galaxies if it meant you still existed in this realm of reality. I forcefully push from my mind our last conversation, not full argument but clipped fragments laced with frustration about the lights in my car left on, the dead battery severely delaying my morning departure. If that chill hadn’t slipped into our interactions that day, I could have been with you. Your trajectory altered. The crash potentially avoided. Maybe it would have, maybe it should have, been me.
8. I order used books when I can find them in decent states of use at acceptable prices. I flip open The Diary of Frida Kahlo and find not your face but that of a man named Miguel. Two perfectly preserved copies of his obituary. I think of my own copy, your life in brief, clipped and laminated, made bookmark for me to keep, and I can’t bring myself to throw them away. I wonder if whoever clipped these misses them. I wonder if and how I could find out. And I think of the letter to the editor printed in the local paper a few days after your passing, griping about young people these days not knowing how to take responsibility for their actions or even how to drive. I think about the seething response I drafted but never sent. In defense of your goodness, the inviolable brilliance of being that lives on in my semantic mind. Converse catharsis: ouroboric rage wringing acid from my guts.
9. I have social anxiety which has been diagnosed and discussed at length in therapy. I feel like my connector is broken. I cannot seem to build genuine relationships with people; a profusion of pain and slow seclusion stem from this fracture. My therapist tells me that if we make one or two real connections in our lives, we should consider ourselves lucky. And we wonder if you were the one. I will never not be thankful, but you are not here anymore. Every time I stop and realize this truth, I wither under the weight.
10. Light leaks left along blue-cratered shadow, yellow crescent, waning gibbous. A butterfly, Artemis, seeks landing on moonshine surface, and from her left ventral wing two blue eyes look on. My third tattoo is not always visible but attracts the most attention. It is the largest and most colorful and took the longest to complete. I relished each scrape of ink-infused needle, knowing it was imprinting the likeness of your vision upon my back. Witness to—if not guide for—my path. I used to always tell the story. Your story. The reason. The why. Now, only if asked. If not, I accept the compliment without further comment while I attempt to blink to brightness the fading apparition of your true-blue eyes before mine.
11. My uncle passed away last year, and my aunt has come down from Dallas to place his ashes in the same cemetery as my grandfather. The same cemetery as my best friend. My heart sister. Before the memorial service begins, I decide to find you. My oldest child wants to come and so I take him to see you. It takes some silent searching among the sections of gravestones as I have not been here in a while. When I flip open your grave marker memorial to reveal your face, the tears fall, hot droplets of desire disquiet, but it feels so good to share you. To speak your name.
12. You still walk the world of my dreams. I treasure bouts of beauty before reality is made obvious. Some stray detail doesn’t fit with who I know you to be. Like playing volleyball when sports were never your thing. Before I even wake, I know you aren’t real, but the feelings your image evokes are. So palpable. So present. Two weeks, three months, a near decade. I wake and the yearning sits on my skin, clinging like collagen. Dirt on sweaty palms. Blood on asphalt.
Melissa Nunez lives and creates in the caffeinated spaces between awake and dreaming. She makes her home in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, where she enjoys observing, exploring, and photographing the local flora and fauna with her three home-schooled children. She is a column contributor at the Daily Drunk Mag. She is also a staff writer for Alebrijes Review and Yellow Arrow Publishing. You can follow her on Twitter: @MelissaKNunez.
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