It was only yesterday I spoke to him
last. He rang me up as soon as
Ethan had left for rehearsal. He was positively squealing with excitement,
giving me blow-by-blow accounts of all the galleries he toured, all the
monuments he visited, and of course… Ethan.
Ethan this, Ethan that, how terrific Ethan was, how much of a prodigy
Ethan was, how much everyone loved Ethan, how much he loved Ethan… I’m
pretty sure the only one he was missing was how much Ethan loved Ethan.
Oh God.
I’m sorry, I… I’m a terrible
person, how could I say that? And now of all time?
Oh God.
He had been so passionate, so full of
life, so bloody obsessive on the phone. I’m
used to it of course, having suffered through many years of been dragged around
to all the art galleries within a 500 mile radius of Pittsburgh. Oh how I hated it.
It’s funny, he could go on and on
for hours and hours about the most intimate details.
Nothing deeply profound or philosophical - just little everyday things
that most people take for granted, or just never notice. But he, he always notices,
he always appreciates - okay maybe not always, as in ‘forever
always’, but definitely ‘recently always’, or at least ever since a couple
of months ago… yet, he would always remain tight lipped about Ethan.
Every time I ask, he would go silent and then get slightly red faced and
tongue-tied. It was cute in a way,
if not slightly nauseating.
I look in the mirror.
I see a black girl with red, puffy eyes, and dry, cracked lips.
I hardly recognize her… should I even recognize her?
I feel oddly detached, this feeling… as if I’m drifting above the
room, looking down, at… well, at someone who is supposed to be me, but yet so
much a stranger. I’m pretty sure
this is a somewhat new development, yet I can’t remember what I felt like
before, what it felt like to be… here.
I don’t think I can pinpoint exactly when this feeling began, but I’m
pretty sure it started with that phone call.
I was getting ready to hit the mall;
I needed some new clothes, as well as this awesome book that I had had my eye
out for since… like, forever. Anyway,
my cell phone rang, just as I was about to get in the car, and you know what?
I’m so bloody grateful, to whatever God that decided to pity me at that
moment, that I had gotten the call before hitting the highway.
One bloody tragedy was enough - definitely enough.
I’m sorry; I’m getting ahead of myself.
Well, I have a habit of checking the caller ID before answering any
calls, call me paranoid, but after watching reruns of Scream, I was afraid to
answer the phone for a week. It had been Jus…
Anyway, it was Mrs. Taylor.
Her voice was low, and shaking so badly I could hardly understand her.
So when she said it, I thought… I thought I had misheard.
Actually, I was positive that I had misheard. I remember asking, over and over again… what the hell
she was on about? What did she
mean? It must have been hell, to have to repeat it over and over again. I hate myself for putting her through that, but at the time,
I think I was numb. I’m sure I
temporarily developed selective hearing. But
in the end there was no use. The
truth was the truth, and there was no point in avoiding it, in denying it, in
ignoring it. Oh, but how I wish I
could, how I wish I could forget about it, to pretend that call never happened.
That everything is fine, that Justin will ring me tomorrow afternoon and
give me the 411 on everything he did.
But that wasn’t, and couldn’t be
the case.
I don’t quite remember when I
offered to ring Deb. All I know was
that a few hours later, actually, many hours later, because I just
couldn’t… wasn’t…
Oh. God.
Anyway, I finally made the call. I think she was out, because the noise on her end was so
loud, I could hear people in the background, cheering, laughing, and having the
fucking time of their lives. I
wanted to scream at them. How could
they laugh? How could they cheer? Didn’t they know?
Of course they didn’t.
It felt like a cruel form of reversed
déjà vu. Deb kept asking me to
repeat myself, just like I had done to Mrs. Taylor, to speak louder - but I
didn’t want to. I didn’t want to scream it out to the entire world; I
didn’t even want to scream it out to myself.
But in the end I did. I lost
it, and I… I hate myself for loosing it, for breaking it to Deb in such a
callous way. And then it was suddenly silent on Deb’s end.
But it was a deafening silence, because in that silence, I heard the
echoes from my earlier cry, surrounding me, torturing me.
“The club Justin and Ethan were at
was bombed, we don’t know if they survived.”
We don’t know if they survived.
We don’t know if they survived. We
don’t know. If Justin survived…
Oh damn you Justin Taylor.
Damn you to hell and back! Why
did you have to go to fucking Europe? You
wanted to see art? Fine. There are
plenty of galleries in Pittsburgh. Was it me? Was it because I didn’t want to go with you to
these galleries? Because damn it Justin! I will follow you willingly to every
single gallery in this entire fucked up universe if you could just be… if you
could just… just…
If you could just come back.
