For Every Missing Shade

Entry 50

A couple of days ago I had dinner with Stew. We sat down at a booth that was too small for him and ordered food that was too large for the table. It looked like we were expecting another dozen friends to eat with us as well, but it was just us. Two emotionally fragile teenagers going for a late-night snack.

It felt nice to hold a conversation with someone who knew how to talk to me. Stew knew when to bring stuff up, how to bring them up, and when to change topics. More than anything else, though, he has never asked me how I'm holding up, that it's always darkest before the dawn, or to "buck up."

Whatever that means anyway.

We would just talk. The things we talked about were shitty, but we didn't act like it. We didn't use sappy voices to show concern for the other person, and we didn't spout horribly overused cliches to try to make the other one feel better.

I talked about how I was working through a painting, and he said her death helped him max out in bench press. Come to think of it, she was still helping us move on even though she was the reason we were being held back. I wondered if she meant for that to happen, or if it was just a small symptom of her death.

I tried to think of signs. Signs that she was still here and other faithful crap like that. I always heard stories about signs that dead spirits showed living people. Something like a butterfly, rainbow, or an apparition that would remind them that their dead person has a soul.

More often than not, they probably saw a butterfly because they live on Earth, or they saw a rainbow because the light from the sun created one through water vapor. It's a magical thing to think the universe conspires to help people remember the dead, and maybe it does, but I couldn't think of a way that the universe could remind me of Emma without giving me cancer too, so I left it alone.

Either way, it was hard to not wonder if Emma got to her Something (with a capital S). I couldn't fathom the idea that a Something existed without Emma getting to it, but it was still a mystery. The thought that there was a Something gave me hope when hope was in short supply.

I thought about what might happen if Christianity was right, or maybe Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and all the other -ism's out there. Was she reincarnated? Is she in Heaven? Is her soul now just traipsing around some limbo, waiting for one thing to happen or another?

I thought of the possibility that she was a ghost, but quickly discounted it; she definitely would have tried to fuck with me by now.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed only fair to her that Eastern Religion was right. I liked the idea of her getting a second try at life. Really, she should be in Nirvana by now after how resilient her soul was in this life, but maybe she wasn't. Perhaps she was born, happy and healthy, into a loving family. Maybe the universe saw her hand in the last life and gave her better cards this time.

It felt good, imagining that Emma's soul was somewhere else, floating through the divine, happier than she ever was on Earth. It made me feel better to think that she could still be with me even if she wasn't with me.

Actually, it was on a day two weeks and three days after Emma's death that I thought I figured out what she might be up to. It was a cloudy, snowy, and ice cold February day and I was wondering how I would get to the Winter Formal dance at my school.

Of course, Emma and I would have gone together. I held onto that thought as I opened up her notebook one more time. I read her journals up until the end of the semester, but there were still more. She skipped a couple of pages and began writing again after Christmas. I read the first entry I saw. The date on the title corresponded with the time we would have been in Colorado.