The funeral felt really long, like it stretched out for hours, days, weeks, months, years, miles, kilometers, continents, oceans and equators. The heaviness that sits on a bunch of people that are mourning the death of a young person weighs trillions of pounds and it crushes your bones. There’s this quote I just got tattooed on my ankle and it says, “Inside each man there is a poet who died young.” Colin died when he was still the poet, but after he died, that poet died in me, that poet died in us all. We felt the poems dying that day. Growing up is realizing that everything about life is unfair, and the most unfair part is that it ends. Life kicked the childhood out of me that day. Once you’re gone you really can’t go back.
We ended up in his bedroom. He pushed me up against his wall and he kissed me. He’d kissed me before, always at parties when he was drunk or high, but this time, it felt different. He meant it this time. He tasted like those white tic-tac’s, kind of vanilla and kind of mint. Pure delicious. I knew then he’d planned it.
“Let me move in you,” he whispered in my ear.
And before I knew it we were having sex, real sex, for my first time ever.
When he finished, I’ll be honest, not that long after we started, he kissed me, really tender, like boys always kiss girls in movies and rarely in real life.
“I love you, Louise” he said before we had to put our clothes on because his parents were home. I felt so pretty when he said that that I started crying and then I couldn’t stop.
He let me sit on the handlebars of his bike and he drove me home the long way. It would have been awkward sticking around his house when his parents were home. I could hear his Mom crying too when we snuck out the back window. So instead, we drove through town dressed all in black, like morbid Amish people during a parade. All I needed was a bonnet.
Later that night, I wondered if all that happened because he wanted to feel closer to Colin. Then I thought, maybe we’ll get married because we have this in common. No one else is going to know Colin, not how we did, and by pledging ourselves to each other for eternity, we would, in some ways, be staying close to Colin forever.
Funny how history works.
I had my headphones on. I listened to the C.D Francais as I had taken to calling it. The music pushed the leaves from the trees, the clouds from the sky, the blue from Heaven, and I could see all the planets. I could see silvery Pluto, the beautiful red Jupiter, and then yellow Venus. I could see the infinite blackness and all the beautiful orbs of colours that populated it. I reached out and touched Neptune. It felt like cold water.
I think I even saw Colin waving at me.
“This town is so severe and silent. I wonder if a person can die from it, choking to death on things they always wanted to but were never able to say,” he told me the week before he died. We’d just gone out for breakfast, the two of us, because everyone else slept through it.
It was a pretty insignificant thing, coming from him. He always said shit about life and death, waxing poetic about unanswerable bullshit. The boys called him Socracock.
It’s only because he’s gone that all those trivial little things from the past echo on and on and on, but I wonder if maybe it was the silence that killed him. Maybe he had died, choking on the silence, seconds before the train hit him. So on his death certificate it should say that the cause of death was “peace and quiet,” not railroad misadventure.
Or maybe the silence killed him metaphorically. Maybe he saw the train coming and decided not to move.
When I went inside, still shivering, I put the kettle on.
The water boiled while the day was on fire, and I watched it, patiently waiting like a bird on a wire.
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