Chapter 2: The Lovers
My wife is the first person who found me here.
I was standing in the middle of the city — the same one I still walk around in now under the unchanging sky. But, when I try to remember where exactly I was, my mind won’t connect the dots for me. It’s stuck in that unfamiliar blur I saw then.
I don’t know how long I was there before I heard her voice.
“Jack.”
I could feel my face holding a smile at that moment, but I didn’t remember making it do that. I didn’t feel any joy. It’s like when you were laughing so long at a joke that you forget the exact words of the punchline that set you off.
The damn numbness of the Between leaves you feeling like you’re perpetually over medicated. It’s like you’re just coming out of or going into a dream.
“June?” I finally asked, without looking up.
I feel a smooth, small hand reach under my chin and lift my eyes up to hers — my blue, brown and green meeting the deep brown of her eyes that I always cherished. When I was a kid, the first song I ever learned on the piano was called “Beautiful Brown Eyes”. I remember then — clunking through notes while I practiced — thinking how stupid it was to name a song after brown eyes.
But the first time I looked into hers, I got it. I still do.
I take all of her in. She looks just like she did when we were young, when we still had so much life left in our bones.
I look down at my hands. My wrinkles are gone. I’m … firmer, I think.
“Jack, you’re confused right now. So I’m just going to rip off the bandaid, okay?”
“Okay, rip away, sweetheart.”
She sighs, breathes in and asks me something that makes my brain fill with memories I’d have rather forgotten.
“How did you die?”
The words linger as the story plays itself back in my head.
June and I were married for 50 years. We met in Racine, Wisconsin, when we were teens. Both of our families had decided to spend a summer day at Wind Point Lighthouse on the north side of the city. There, on the beach, I saw June for the first time. And I felt like there was this rope that suddenly wrapped around me, pulling me towards her.
I don’t remember what exactly I said. Though, I do remember her making fun of me for it. But I’ll never forget the way the sun hit her eyes. Or the way her smile slowly breaks across her face when I say something ridiculous and she’s trying not to give me the satisfaction of knowing she thought it was funny.
After high school, we got married. We tried to have kids, but we never had any luck. It was just us going through life together, thick and thin. We held hands through more wars than we’d remember without really thinking about it; we’ve slept side-by-side through the advent of cassettes through the complete annihilation of physical copies of anything that you can get instead on a small screen.
And we were happy doing so side-by-side.
Then, she started to struggle to remember my name. Or, I’d find her in rooms just standing there confused.
After a while, I knew what it was. We went to the doctor and got the diagnosis and all of the referrals they could give us for people who could help us at home.
For a while, I thought we were doing fine.
But one day, while I was sitting on the couch, June had gone upstairs. I assumed she was just tired or was using the bathroom.
Then, I heard the sound. It just sounded like something fell over. I called out her name. No response.
I got up as quickly as I could and moved upstairs to see what was going on.
There, in the middle of the bedroom was June, hanging from the ceiling fan and wearing her wedding dress. I ran over and I tried to lift her, but I couldn’t. The muscles that used to be able to lift her up in the air had long atrophied.
All I could do after I realized she was gone, was stand there crying while holding on to my dead wife.
The ambulance came and went. The funeral home staff came and went. The funeral came and went.
Nothing felt the same anymore.
I wasn’t the same anymore.
So I just started drinking.
Not even really eating.
Just drinking. Throwing up. Drinking. Passing out. Waking up. Drinking. Crying. Throwing up. Drinking. Passing out. Waking up.
That was my routine for about a year, before I stopped making it to the “Waking Up” part of the schedule. I was just an old drunk whose body was found days later in his home after neighbors complained of a smell. Voices of hushed “poor man” and “he had just lost his wife” met my corpse on its black-bag stroll to the back of an ambulance that wouldn’t turn its lights on, not that time.
That’s when I got here, and she found me again.
“June, do you remember how YOU died?” I ask.
She looks down for a moment, maybe a sign of some shame lingering in her memory.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Why did you do it, Kid?”
“I forgot you existed. That I had ever been married. And I couldn’t take that.”
“I was right downstairs.”
“I know that now. But ….”
“…. I get it. You weren’t yourself. I’m sorry I didn’t go up there with you.”
“It’s fine. It’s not your fault.”
We stood there looking at each other for a moment. I don’t have any resentment towards her. I’m glad to see her. Wherever this is.
“So is this Hell? I mean, I’m here,” I finally ask.
She shakes her head, and says, “It’s not paradise, either.”
“Then where am I?”
“You’re in a place that the dead go when they don’t really belong to the other two. We don’t have everlasting joy, nor do we experience an eternity of damnation. We simply go on,” she says.
“So, we’re kind of alive?”
“Wrong again, honey,” she says softly. “This isn’t life. In life, things change. They grow. They age. They move. Things don’t change here.”
She points her finger up at the sky before continuing.
“The sun will never set or rise for you again,” she explains. “Everything you see in the sky — the colors, the shapes, the amount of light — That’s what you’ll always see when you look up. You will never see more stars. You will never see the blue you knew in life break across the sky. The day, the hour, the moment will never change around us.”
“You’ll forget moonlight ever existed,” she adds. “And ‘sunlight’ will simply be a word you used to say at some point in the totality of existence. You won’t even remember when. But you get used to it. You stop caring pretty quickly.”
“Well, that was pretty damn grim, June.”
“I know. But I always gave it to you straight, dear.”
After I got my bearings a little more, June and I explored the Between. For years or centuries or even millenia, we got to know every inch of it. We figured out everything anyone here knew about it and wrote it down in a journal.
After we’d finally gotten to know everything we could about this place, we decided to rebuild a home somewhere.
We picked a small town in what you would call the west part of the Between — the kind that looks like any other average Midwest town. We chose a house in a nice neighborhood of houses that all looked the same, just like the ones we’d grown up in.
And we spent our days just talking and doing whatever we wanted.
It was sublime.
But the Between can’t have “sublime”. Remember, this isn’t paradise. We’re not allowed to be too happy, or too sad.
When we start to feel too good about our existence, they take away our memories.
I say “they” cause I assume there’s someone in charge, but truth is, I’ve only heard rumors of them. Either way, our entire memory of our time here gets erased. Whether you’ve been here a day or thousands of years, you’ll think you just got here, and you won’t remember anything about it.
Thinking back, I should have tried harder to keep things in check. Maybe if I held back on telling her too many things about the way I feel about her or sparking too many memories about our shared past …. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened.
But one day, we were walking around the city. We weren’t even really talking at all. As we turned down our street holding hands, I asked her if she wanted to lie in the yard for a little while. She said “Yes.”
So I ran ahead — looking back for a second to see June watching me with the biggest smile I’d seen her have on her face since we died — and quickly popped in our house to grab a blanket for us to lie on.
When I came back out, she was just standing in the same spot, dead eyes looking straight ahead. I’ve seen new arrivals before. I know what it looks like.
I called her name, she didn’t look. I yell it louder from our steps. Nothing.
That’s when I realized it. I’d seen it before, and other people had described it to me before.
I just never thought it’d happen to her.
I turn and slowly walk back into our house. I put the blanket back on the bed we’ve shared since the end of our time and that I thought we could continue to share until the end of time.
Meanwhile, she’s still standing there. Doesn’t even so much as look left or right.
I know what I have to do. This time, I get to do for her what she did for me.
But this time, I’m not going to remind her who I am, if she’s still forgotten.
I’m not going to tell her we were ever married, if she doesn’t remember me.
I’m just going to take care of her, as whatever I can be in her death/afterlife that won’t make her smile too much or feel too much.
I won’t let her be erased again.
I won’t let her memory get all screwy with her in death like it did in life. Especially not because of my own selfish wants.
I possibly can’t ever tell her our story in life, or even about our first go-around here in the Between.
I can’t call her all of the nicknames I’ve had for her throughout all of these moments we’ve shared across the spectrum of time.
I’ll possibly never be able to tell my wife I love her ever again.
That’s what will keep me from ever truly being happy here.
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