Page 74 of The Cabin
She wants to say more, but I go inside, because it’d just go around in circles.
Shit, I think I need to think, myself.Heart WorkHe brings me coffee in the morning. I leave him offerings of food in return—I’m relearning how to cook. I used to be good at it, used to love it. I used to cook on the weekends, when I wasn’t working. Every once in a while, Adrian would get a hankering for something in particular, and I’d oblige. But now, I’m cooking for me.
I make biscuits, the way Mom used to make them, light and flaky and buttery. Beef stew, with thick chunks of meat and big wedges of potato and slices of carrot. Chili, as taught to me by my college friend Tanner, who learned Tex-Mex chili from county fair cook-off winners. I even figure out the trick to my aunt’s bread, which took a whole day of try, try, try again until I got it just right. I bake pies and cakes, pain au chocolat from an internet recipe, which is nowhere near as good as it was in Paris, of course.
I make some for me, and some for him.
I told him I needed to think, but really, I’m just scared.
I like him.
I like his coffee. I like his big, rough, strong presence. I like the occasional Louisiana twang in his voice. I like how he’s so smart despite having never been to real school. I like that I can sit on my beanbag chair late at night, reading, and hear him on his porch playing his guitar. I hear him playing Ed Sheeran and Harry Styles and Alan Jackson and Tim McGraw and songs I don’t know. I hear him play that one tune he wrote, for his wife I assume. He plays it a lot, and seems to be adding to it, perfecting and polishing it. I like that he can sit in silence with me and not need to fill it. I like his eyes, big and deep and brown. I like his hands, which are the size of dinner plates just about, scarred and weathered and lined like a map of the world carved into old hickory.
I hate that I like these things. That I’ve noticed them.
That they’re lessening the pierce of sorrow.
I hate that it’s easier to wake up, now, and that it seems to be, in some ways, directly attributable to him. But it’s not, not entirely. I’m sleeping, and eating, and relaxing, and I’m not dehydrated constantly and I’m not stressed out about work. These things help. I’m learning that waking up and missing Adrian is just part of living, not the entirety of me. I’m learning that if I read and bake and cook and paint and walk along the shore in the Georgia fall sun, that I can go hours now without missing him so bad it hurts.
I’m learning to sit through the missing him, to let it dwell in me, and that eventually, the sharpness of it will subside. Like being hungry in the middle of a long shift with no opportunity for lunch—ignore the hunger, and it fades. It’ll still be there, later. But your body seems to just go, oh, we’re not eating now, huh? All right, I’ll wait.
Sorrow, with the space of weeks and months between the event and emotion, seems to function much the same. It hurts, hurts like a motherfucker. Hurts like it did the day he died, some days. But you just have to sit in it. To let it run its course. It’ll fade.
You’ll make it through it.
You won’t actually die from how bad it hurts, even if it feels like you could, even if, in the midst of it, you almost want to.
It’s all so confusing.
And I don’t know what to do.
Because as a day turns into two, turns into a week and there’s no more breakfast on his porch or mine and no more lazy afternoons on the dock, and his understanding presence always seeming to be right there when I needed it and comforting in a way I didn’t know was possible.
I miss him.
And that hurts.
It’s weird, though—it’s the same verb: to miss. If you Google it, the third definition of miss has three entries: to notice the loss or absence of, to feel regret or sadness at no longer being able to enjoy the presence of, and to regret or be sad about not being able to do, have, or be or go.
I can say I miss Adrian, and that I miss Nathan, but despite meaning the same semantic thing, the two are a universe apart.
What do I do with it all?
Was this whole “I need space to think” an experiment? To see how I’d react to not being around Nathan? If it is, I’m not sure how I feel about the results.
