Your mom always used to make
raspberry pies in November. I’m not quite sure why, maybe for the depression of
it all, or just that the freezer would start to get full with leftover soup at
that point of the year and so the frozen raspberries that had been there since
you and your brother picked them in July would be the ones to get the boot to
make space for the newcomers.
Hence the pies.
Your mom’s name was Julie,
which I always thought was a little funny because that was also my
grandmother’s name. My dead grandmother, that is, so maybe it doesn’t really
count. After all, is a name really yours anymore when you’re not there to
defend it?
You always hated when I talked
about dead people like they didn’t matter. History is important, you’d say
firmly, brown eyes a little too serious behind your smudged wire-rimmed
glasses. How else can we ever hope to learn all the ways we can fuck up and hold
our own shitshow in perspective?
I said I didn’t think we’d
ever fucked up as bad as we were in the process of doing right now, so clearly
history had done shit. Why bother trying to keep their names alive for eternity
when they couldn’t even be bothered to keep us alive for the handful of decades
called a lifetime.
You’d always frown at me then,
disappointed in my pessimism, even though you were the one who started it with
all this “history as the eternal teacher” bullshit. Your fingers would tighten
a little too much, pinching at my palm. Don’t say that, you insisted, urgent
and anxious like you’d get when I’d pushed you just past the edge of solid
ground and into a briary patch of despair that really has nothing to do with my
idle philosophizing.
Sorry, I’m just messing
around, I promised, squeezing your fingers. Let’s go eat pie.
Later that day I stood on your
porch under the terrible flickering outdoor lamp, spattered with the dried guts
of moths who believed in promises a little too much, and kissed your
raspberry-stained mouth and whispered again that I was sorry, a secret just for
your skin. But you shook your head. Don’t be, you breathed, fingertips tugging
at the hem of my sweater. I’m just scared you’re right.
Despite my worrying tendency
to make casual grandiose statements about human nature that I held no emotional
stake in because I was a teenager and just trying to sharply elbow the
surrounding world into reacting in some way, please just in any way so
I know I’m at least a little bit alive, you kept me around. You kept
holding my hand a little too hard and kissing me a little too soft and wearing
out a small, faded hole in the corner of my frantic heart just for yourself.
Your mom kept feeding me her depression pies and pulling me into group hugs
with you and your siblings like I had always been meant to be there, like I had
been chosen just the same as her actual children, that I was a human she had
committed to intentionally caring about since before the first day of my
existence.
I felt chosen by you and your
family in a way I’ve never felt anywhere else.
I still think about your mom
when I eat raspberries, you know. Even after ten years and getting to know the
mothers of three people who aren’t you but I pretend fill the you-shaped hole
you wore into me. I even bake a November depression pie every year in her
honour and sit in my tiny apartment eating it at 3am amidst the mess of books
and scarves and dying plants that has somehow become my life. And when I wake
up the next morning and go into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee that will
somehow have to do instead of a life force to get me through the day, I see the
stained plate beside the sink, the fork’s tines licked clean like its strange
tidiness means I get to forget you any sooner.
It’s fun, these promises (lies)
we make to ourselves when no one else is watching, isn’t it?
I wonder what lies you tell
yourself. You always tried to be so honest, but even you were forced to be a
fallible human being sometimes, much to your dismay. I always enjoyed those
moments, when you’d blink your eyes closed for a second too long, swallowing
back the tang of the dishonesty before committing to it.
I hope you tell more lies now.
That you’re comfortable enough with yourself to know not everyone has to read
your heart upon request. You can say no, shrug away their inquisition like
you’re someone else, someone whose bravery shines different than yours. No
better than your quiet determination and solid, unshakeable goodness, just
different.
I think I’d like to see it.
You lie, that is. Maybe someday we’ll run into each other on the subway and you
can try it out. A feigned look of apathy when I say hi a little too quietly, my
heartbeat rushing in my ears with how badly I want to just reach out and touch
you, see if your skin still smells the same even after ten years without me.
You could smile politely at my small talk, brush off any of my questions about
your larger life with casual ease, and waltz away looking like the perfect
portrait of an ex moved on until you find a bathroom to cry in. Not my bathroom
though, that’ll be taken up with my own tears.
I don’t know. Could be
fun.
And I do want you to have fun,
you know. I want these past ten years to have been glorious for you. I want you
to have learned how to run in the rain the way you always wanted to, umbrella
forgotten in your backpack, arms up to the sky in the closest you’ll ever get
to prayer. I want you to have danced with someone pretty when you got a little
too drunk and not even thought of me for a second when she grabbed your collar
to pull you in for a kiss the way I always used to. I want you to have
graduated from university with some strange little degree in whatever will make
you happy and jumped up and down with your mom and your siblings a little too
excitedly for someone who just got an official piece of paper saying they’re a
real life adult now.
I was supposed to get to see
it.
That one’s on me though. Me
and my sharp elbows and my brutal mouth and my hunger, my irrational,
terrible need, to tear things down just a little bit. To prove my
pulse is still racing by stepping back and looking around at all the damage I
was capable of leaving.
And that one night I tore a
little too much and lost you, you with your beautiful eyes and your bitten lips
and too much love to let me hurt you the way I hurt myself.
You were right but that
doesn’t mean I can’t hate you for it. Of course not as much as I hate myself,
but that’s not new, so I tend to fixate on the little sliver of rage I leave
for you, the one I only think about when it’s 3am and I’m eating raspberry pie.
It’s a selfish kind of hate, but it’s there all the same and I’m trying to be
more honest since my promises just keep turning out to be lies.
So I hope you’re well. That’s not a lie, remember the resolution? Please be well. Because I’m not. So I hope your precious fate played nice for once and let one of us get away with it, that outrageous, murderous, vindictive plan of being happy.
The end, perhaps.
Sophia Lindfield (she/her) is
a climate activist from K’jipuktuk. Her writing explores her experiences with
climate anxiety, her identity as a young queer woman, and how politics
intersects with everyday life. Previous credits include the Budge Wilson Short
Fiction Award, Fathom Literary Journal, the National Observer, and the Hill
Times.
