Memento

The day after she died was the worst of my life; and I was forced to execute each and every one of the duties that she had previously amused herself with. I found myself performing the activities that I had seen her carry out and enjoy every day- feeding the dog, sweeping the kitchen, even making dinner.


Worse yet was completing the ends of the unfinished tasks that she had started- taking the clothes that she had placed color-coordinated into the washing machine out and putting them into the drier, removing the lint sheet, taking the tomatoes that she had bought at the local farmer’s market out of their brown paper bags and tucking them into the vegetable drawer of our refrigerator.


To know that not a day before her loving smile had driven the darkness from our dining room disgusted me- made me nauseas.


I missed her. Missed her soft laugh, reverberating through the walls of our bedroom, her hard, intelligent, almond brown eyes and silky chestnut brown hair, waving behind her as she spun in the park, taking in a summers day and removing all doubt in my mind that she wasn’t the best thing that had ever happened to me. I missed her skinny jeans, missed her sense of humor, her figure, the way she moved through a room, even her scent, which lingered on the few articles of clothing that I had decided to keep.


The first night was even worse.
The empty hollow left in the absence of her body left me up for hours, frustrating me to the point where I simply walked away and decided to sleep on the couch, which only angered me further, as I had surrounded myself with memories of her; our photo booth pictures that we had taken at the fair in July of last year, her scent splayed across the loveseat, and even the old CDs that we listened to together- everything from Christina Applegate to Cream to Carlos Varela. For fifteen awkward and awful minutes, I suffered through the memories and pain that I now associated with the sights, scents, and sounds of my former lover. When I realized that I couldn’t bear it any more, I systematically went through the house and destroyed most of the furniture that now occupied the rooms of what was once our house; but now was simply mine. I threw the TV across the room, landing with a crash in the middle of our coffee table, shattering the glass and sending the entire structure to the floor. I toppled the cabinets in our living room, ripped up the couch with the stainless steel Japanese knife she had given me on Christmas of last year, and smashed our plates, wine glasses, and ceramics with one swing of a sledge hammer. I threw all of the sheets, blankets, and curtains into a big pile in the backyard, doused them in lighter fluid, and set them- along with a good thousand dollars worth of our clothing- alight. By the time I had finished my rampage through the house, almost nothing remained.


It’s funny to think about- the word 'our' has three letters, and is relatively short. The word 'mine' contains four. You'd think that with this extra letter you might receive something- that the bump up from three to four would mean that you had gained some sort of bonus possession. All that I gained that night was a horrible, sordid feeling deep in my gut. It was as if the bullet that had ravaged her body had somehow spiritually lodged in my abdominal cavity, and now sat there, festering and infecting my gut, my body slowly calcifying it, not removing the problem but making it larger and larger as it went; like an oyster trying to do away with a grain of sand, yet simply covering it up and creating new problems for itself.


My grain of sand, my wife's unfair trial at the hands of the cruel criminal who had taken her life, was concealed, not through calcium created by my body or pearly substances that beautified the problem, but with thick black fumes emitted from industrial smokestacks, with thin death-sticks, with strong alcohol and drugs; with abusive behavior towards myself- I couldn’t think of what else to do.


On a blazing August night a mere week after the incident, I swam through the humidity to the exact spot where she was killed. I drew out the silhouette of her slain body on the sidewalk- a memory etched and infused into my mind forever- the blood, the chalk, the cracked cement and sparse grass, brown with summer's devouring heat and unforgiving sun, that thermal energy that still remained though late at night within the sidewalk and road like the heat that slowly departed her body as I knelt beside it that fateful summer night. It was as if her life had drained into the sidewalk through the entry and exit wounds that the metal missile had left in its wake. Calmly but carefully I gave her section of the sidewalk a makeover of sorts, cleaning the spent gum and dripped tar and dirt and grass and grime from her soul's final resting place. Slowly, I made sure that the place where her soul had sapped out onto the sidewalk was absolutely perfect. Taking half of the vial of cinder and ash that remained of her body, I slowly rubbed it into the cracks in the sidewalk, at the spot where she fell that night.


As I walked away I held her hand, walking away from the place where her life had been extinguished, and told her that she was the best thing that happened to me. I told her that I was now truly devoted to the earth in which she lay in rest. I would not distract myself with worldly possessions or chemically created mind-distorting substances. I yearned -no- ached- for freedom; somewhere were I could run free and not give a damn. I would be a free spirit, Phaedrus of Zen and the Art, a man made of the earth devoted to an earth not made by man.


It was at that moment that I decided to move to Georgia. The move was the very first thing that came to mind once I had rubbed the black remains of my significant other into the cement on the hot summer night earlier described. It was all I could think of afterwards. At 11:58 pm, I packed everything that I valued and had not already broken into a leather bag that she had bought for me on one of our late night shopping excursions- besides an old t-shirt of hers, it would be the only physical memento that I would keep of her.