one hypothetical

fair warning, there's a suicide in this

ritmo paranoico, myra landau

there, on the terra cotta tile of the kitchen floor, left open, as it had fallen out of her hands: her ex situationship’s suicide note. the seriousness of the occasion had pushed him into the only formality in correspondence that he knew: that of the coastal grandmother. a card from the museo universitario arte contemporáneo, alternating mazey blocks of grayscale & color. the text filled both sides of the card & even spilled onto the back. the tone was that of a college graduation card, mentioning her interests, her hobbies, her hopes, stuff she didn’t know he knew about her, her bright future, only instead of a check for $X00 he had slipped in one loaded sentence: “this was always going to happen, don’t think this is any of your fault.”

could he have thought she would have thought it was? this was the first time he had addressed her without being carefully mean. blaring subtext: don’t think i’m going to love you. and yet she’d gone to visit him anyway, in mexico city, in some balkan state, in nepal, the cheap haunts of pmc failsons, assuming she was one of a rotation, a necessity flown in from the states like his psych meds. sure you can get it cheaper locally, but you just feel safer with the american stuff.

she looked up his obituary. his family had described him as creative & a world traveller. a mass at trinity episcopal. she’d fly out for him one last time.

she was surprised when his mother looked back at her with recognition. even more surprised when she approached her after, by the party sandwich tray. “i knew it was you.” his mother turned her phone towards her, open to the conversation between her & her son, a picture of our heroine in mexico city from their last visit. a picture she had taken herself & which he must have gotten from her instagram. “he talked so much about you in those last few months, he cared about you, he admired you so much.” but it had been months since he had talked to her.

she imagined if he had. imagined holding his hand at restaurants, letting his parents pay half the rent of her apartment, or all the rent on a place in a cheaper city. she imagined emerging from her wfh nook every night to the perfectionistic meals & chaos of dishes that he created whenever he cooked. well, maybe not every night, he ordered lots of ubereats when a challenge wasn’t actively inspiring him. she imagined asking him what he meant by some of the things he said in his songs, a question she had witheld in the face of his own disinterest in her. & then she imagined being annoyed with his inconsistency, his moodiness, she imagined yelling & kicking him out & then this happening.

but she could not convince herself that was what he had wanted out of her. it seemed more likely that the kind talk about her had been a sweet last gift for his mother, to feel her son had loved and been loved.