Authors: Samantha Schutz
as she comes up beside me.
“Yeah. I guess so,”
I say even though I’ve been here
so many times since she saw me last.
“Looks like you’ve got the right idea sitting.
Down isn’t so much the problem.
Will you give me a lift in a little while?”
“Sure,” I say
as she awkwardly lowers herself down.
“Hello there, Brian.
I’m with your nice friend, Annaleah.
You’re missing a beautiful day here.
But I bet it’s real nice where you are too.
You be sure to say hello to my Joey.
And let him know
that I am thinking about him too.”
I’ve never heard anyone speak
at a graveside like this before.
Like me.
Freda sees my amazement.
“Do you talk to him too?” she asks.
“Sometimes.”
“I think talking
about good times helps.
What do you say?”
There were
good times.
But there were bad times too.
And a lot of nothing times.
“All sorts of things, I guess.
But mostly, what it’s like
without him.”
“You were more than just friends.”
She doesn’t ask it.
She says it.
The recognition
that I’ve been waiting for.
Tears well up in my eyes.
“Do you come to talk to him a lot?”
“Almost every day.”
“Oh, honey,” she says
as she takes my hand in hers.
“It’s important to remember Brian,
to keep him in your heart,
and to visit with him.
But this isn’t a place for every day.
Nothing grows here
besides grass.”
She moves her hand to my back
and alternately rubs and pats.
I am crying harder now.
I don’t want her to feel me shaking,
but I don’t want her to take her hand away either.
I look around and think about what she said:
Nothing grows here.
She’s right.
This isn’t a place for growth.
It’s a place to look back on the past.
that my dad left.
I cannot control
that Brian died.
But I can control
if I choose to maintain my friendships.
I can control
if I try to be closer to my mom.
I can control
whether or not
I get to know Ethan better.
There are spaces in my heart
that are being filled
by what could have been with Brian,
and the stories
about my father and the Dearly Departed.
I think I need to free up some of that space
for the people in my life
that are actually here.
I need to not keep that space reserved
for people who are never coming.
Across it I’ve written,
I’m sorry for being such a freak.
Ethan picks it up and smiles.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I don’t know.
Yes. No. Maybe.”
“Are we okay?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then…
here are your slices for table seven.”
And just like that,
we are
okay.
to write a happy list—
the small things in life
that make me happy.
The first thing on the book’s sample list
is puppies and kittens.
I can’t help but laugh.
Are they kidding?
But I guess laughing
puts me in a better mood to do this.
So here goes:
Garlic knots.
Soft sheets that smell like detergent.
Stars in a clear night sky.
Getting texts from friends.
Fireflies and crickets.
Brian’s eyes.
Strawberry ice cream.
Sitting in the sun.
My jeans with the hole in the knee.
Making friends laugh.
Seeing Ethan smile.
Sun showers.
My beat-up white Converse.
Pink roses in bloom.
Joy asks as we sit on her bed.
“I don’t know.
Ethan is fun to be around.
And cute. But—”
“Lee, it’s not like you need to decide
if you want to marry him.
It’s more simple.
Are you curious to see
where it might go?”
Where can it go?
All sorts of tragic scenes come to mind.
Car accidents. Fires.
Ethan disappearing.
Me being left, devastated.
“I don’t know if I’m ready.
I don’t think I could handle
the disappointment.”
“Lee, you can handle a lot.
You made it through this summer.
What could be harder than that?”
“I guess.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.
I’ll think about it.”
Joy throws a glittery pillow at my head.
“Thinking never got anyone anywhere.”
eating lunch in the back.
We are squeezed together.
His shirt is touching my arm.
Our knees are inches from each other.
I want to close the gap,
the painful gap.
I cross my legs the other way
to fill the space.
My knee lands against his.
Contact.
I can finally breathe.
that talks about relaxation.
It suggests that when you are in bed
you try imagining
being on a beach or in a field
with the warm sun on your face.
I never did the exercise,
but right now I’m on a work break,
actually sitting outside in the sun,
so I give it a try.
I shut my eyes
and try to remember what the book said—
something about letting in the rays of sunlight
to help get rid of the dark.
Immediately, the
Sesame Street
theme song
creeps into my head and makes me smile:
“Sunny day, sweepin’ the clouds away…”
Okay. Focus.
This is serious.
I shut my eyes again.
I feel the sun hitting my face,
warming the top of my head.
Behind my eyelids, all I see is bright yellow.
The longer I sit,
the brighter the yellow grows,
the warmer I feel.
The more the tension in my shoulders
melts away.
I try to focus only on that—
the warmth and the yellow.
And for a few moments,
that’s all there is.
He asks me if I want
to hang out
and I say yes.
Being with Ethan
feels different.
Talking to him
and having him
talk back to me.
Looking at him
and having him
look back at me.
And then there are the times
when we touch.
They’re just accidental bumps
or nudges,
but it feels amazing.
We stop and sit.
The grass is speckled with dandelions,
the kind that have turned white and poofy.
I pick one up,
twirl the stem between my fingers.
“Make a wish,” he says.
“Really?”
“Go on. I’ll do it too.”
We both pause for a moment,
then blow.
The seeds scatter in the air,
then float back down like tiny parachutes.
“What’d you wish for?” he asks.
“I can’t tell you.
It won’t come true.”
“Well, fine then.
I won’t tell you my wish either.”
He fake-pouts like a little kid.
It’s getting late,
nearly dinner when Ethan says,
“I better go.
I’m having people over tonight—
kind of an end-of-summer party.
You should come,
if you can.”
as I try to get dressed for Ethan’s party.
I can’t decide what to wear,
mostly because I am too busy
imagining what it’d be like to kiss him.
This image makes my heart
flutter.
It makes between my legs
flutter.
I feel all of this energy
going through me.
I have not been able to sit still all night.
My fingers tap the table.
My toes tap the floor.
I cannot focus.
My chest feels tight
but instead of anxiety,
I feel excitement.
standing on his back deck,
wearing an untucked button-down and jeans.
It’s a treat to see him again in real clothes
and not those horrid checkered pants.
Crowds of people are around
and below him.
But he seems sort of oblivious.
He’s just staring up at the dark sky.
He sees me coming and nods at the stars,
“Should we make a wish?”
“What’s with you and the wishes today?”
He just shrugs and points up into the darkness.
“I’m wishing on that one.
Which one are you going to wish on?”
“That one,”
I say, pointing upward.
We are quiet for a moment
before he asks,
“So…what’d you wish for?”
“Ethan, we’ve been through this.”
“Okay, okay,” he says.
“How about we each
write down our wish,
then exchange.
When we are both home
and getting into bed,
we can look.”
I laugh.
I didn’t figure him for the cheesy type.
“All right,” I say
and he goes into the house
and comes back with paper and pens.
I write:
I wish that we had kissed this afternoon.
My heart races as I write those eight words.
I think about ripping up the paper
and rewriting something less risky,
but don’t.
I take a deep breath,
take his note,
and he takes mine.
I head home.
Partly because I don’t know anyone there
besides Ethan and Lou.
But mostly because I’m dying to read the note.
I can feel it in my back pocket.
It is an itch on my skin
that I have to scratch.
The farther I walk from Ethan’s house,
the more the itch begins to burn.
I make it three blocks before I stop
and take the note out of my pocket.
As I unfold it, my heart pounds.
I’m excited to see what it says.
I hope that it’s about me,
but I’m scared
that it will be something dumb, like
I wish for world peace,
and I will be humiliated.
And then the note is open
and I am reading it
and it says:
To kiss you
.
And before I realize it,
I am running.
Running
the three blocks back to Ethan’s house,
and then I am through his front door,
scanning the faces, looking for him.
And then I am out the back door,
and on the back deck.
I see Lou and ask if he’s seen Ethan.
He says he saw him in the backyard.
And then I am down the stairs,
and searching for Ethan’s face again.
He doesn’t see me coming at first,
but when he does, he looks confused.
In one quick motion,
I put my hand on his chest,
push him into the shadows under the deck,
and then I am kissing him.
And it is amazing.
Just the right mix
of hard and soft.
After a little while,
I can feel him smiling,
and I pull back.
“You cheated,” he says.
“You didn’t wait until you got home.”
“You didn’t look?”
“No. Should I look now?”
“Yes.”
He reads the note, smiles,
then puts one hand on the side of my face,
the other on my neck,
and kisses me.
It is warm
and it is real.
to write a letter to Brian in heaven.
Dear Brian,
The last few months
have been a roller coaster.
Meeting you
and starting to get to know you
was really exciting.
But there were limits
on how close you let me get.
And I guess I did a bit of the same.
When we were together,
I was willing to take whatever you gave.
And after you died
I was able to see
how little that was.
I deserved
and still deserve
more.
I’m not sorry or regretful
about us.
There were good times.
I learned things about myself.
And it also made me see that memories—
real or imagined—
can’t make me whole.
I’ll never know
why you were the way you were.
I’ll never know if it was because of your dad.
Or if it was because you didn’t
like me enough.
But I’m going to have to learn
to be okay with not knowing.
Brian, I want you to be at peace
and I want that for myself too.
And I don’t think I’ll get that
if I keep visiting you like I have been.
It keeps me from growing.
So I’m writing to you
to tell you that I’m not
going to come around for a while.
I’ll still think of you.
You’ll still be the first guy
I ever really cared about.
But I’ve got to let you go.
Now what?
It’s not like I can look up
the address for heaven in the White Pages
and put a stamp on this
and drop it in the mail.
I know this letter was for me.
But I still want to do something with it.
The death book suggests
that I fold it into a paper airplane
or put it in a bottle and send it out to sea.
But I have another idea.