Stories from the Back of His Motorcycle

I’ve been told that on sad days it is supposed to rain. In fact, it’s supposed to pour so hard you can hear it from wherever you’re hiding out under your covers, and there’s supposed to be thunder and lightning, enough to make every hair on your body stand on end. On that Wednesday afternoon, though, it was pretty mild. The sun peeked out every hour or so and the clouds weren’t bold enough to stay together much. I guess the sadness in the air broke them up. Nobody wanted to be around a graveyard during a funeral anyway.

I watched the others. I couldn’t face the casket or the mourners or the black surrounding me. Encompassing me. Entrapping me. The others were the only people in the graveyard not part of our little tribe, setting flowers on gravestones and glancing nervously over, scared as if we may invite them to join us. They’d been here before; they didn’t want to go back. Those they loved were safely in the ground and not moving down into a hole which I sincerely hoped I would never have to be lowered into.

Cremated, I thought numbly. I want to be cremated. It bypasses all the rummaging around for some piece of clothing which might have been black once and the Mexican wave of crying which we seem to be stuck in. I think Vaughn’s Mom started it, Keisha’s Mom next and from then on it was instantaneous.

It’s hard to look at a crying mother and then look away, your eyes are glued to that woman and all you can do is feel your heart beating right down into the soles of your feet and your whole body going numb with pain. Her loss is so palpable. You know she will be the last one here tonight. And the first one back tomorrow morning. And the one who won’t ever move on no matter how many more funerals happen in this graveyard or how many people pat her on the back and tell her it’s time now. I can picture her so clearly, sitting by those big, big windows in her house and waiting for her baby to come home. She’d tell those people that it’s not time yet, just a little longer, wait for a while more.

And as I picture her, I can’t distract myself with the others in this horrible graveyard. I’m through with imagining what the elderly lady by the big oak tree is doing here, who she’s mourning, what kind of flowers she just laid on that gravestone. There is the here and now, on this Wednesday afternoon, and I feel so sick that it’s a wonder that I can even stand upright.

Someone is sobbing in my left ear. Loudly. I don’t have the heart to look; I couldn’t even if I wanted to. There are only tears I had started to wonder if I had forgotten how to cry out. Not one had shed since the news over a week ago and yet here, with all the family and friends and little old me standing so much taller than everyone else, they come so naturally. Like a social smoker, I’m all the way back to the beginning, following the crowd. This isn’t something I want to be a part of, though.

So I steal myself away when I can finally see the ground in front of me. One foot forward, the other curling at the toe. Walking. Walking. I lost sight of the funeral, the church obscuring my view of them to reveal something new altogether.

God. I hate that word, I hate Him, I hate everything. The stain glass windows are mocking in their purity, because how can something be good while taking away someone so beautiful? So young and untouched and innocent. There can’t be a God if he sees fit to do something like that.

There’s a stone wall against my back and my fists are just balls of white I’ve screwed up too tightly. It hurt to think back and it hurt to think of the future so I just stopped. I slid slowly down, the cold stone cutting through my clothes with enough force to bruise my backbone. I am a mess and I don’t even have a right to be. There were others more important, people closer to the dead, and yet I was the coward who’d camped out behind the church.

I wish those months back to before Vaughn when none of this would have happened and I could have been out with Delia at some party with some nameless boy and some nameless bottle of vodka. The fact that this was inevitable; this funeral and this sadness, was obsolete because I wouldn’t have known about it. Selfish Alice would have been okay in all her ice queen glory.

And so not okay at all.

I don’t cry again after that.