I sob and sob, and he just holds me. Eventually I pull myself together and let words pour out of me. “Over and over I see it. Every time I close my eyes, I see him die. I know it’s not my fault, I always did. I convinced myself it was my fault because that was better than the pain of him being gone.”
“He’s gone. You have to accept it.”
“I know. It just hurts.” Now comes the hardest admission of all. “I find myself forgetting him. I see him dying over and over, but I can’t remember what he smelled like. What his arms felt like holding me. What sex with him felt like. What kissing him felt like. I can’t remember him. And I wonder sometimes if I ever really loved him. If it was just teenage infatuation. Thinking I loved him because he was my first. Because we’d f**ked. I don’t know. I don’t remember. And now there’s you, and you’re…better than he was. Stronger. You turn me on in a way I don’t remember with him. You make me feel things he never did. The way you kiss me, it’s better than I remember his kisses being. When you made me come, I realized I’d never felt anything like it, ever. Ever. Not in all the times I was with Kyle in the two years we were together.”
A scream of raw impotent pain and self-loathing and anger and grief tears out my throat; Colton clutches me tighter and lets me scream. Doesn’t shush me or quiet me or whisper anything or tell me it’s okay.
“I’ve forgotten him, Colton! I never even loved him, and he’s gone! And I’ll never get him back and I’ll never be okay!”
“Forgetting is the mind’s way of helping you heal. Helping you move on. You did love him, Nell. He was your first. Your best friend before that. I know that much about you two. You were inseparable from birth. You did love him. Yeah, he’s gone and it f**king sucks more than anything. He was taken from you too soon, from all of us. I can’t make that okay. But you have to be okay. You have to let yourself heal and move on. You’re stuck in the moment of his death, right now. Locked into a cycle with no way out. You have to break the cycle.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Feel. Grieve. Let yourself feel all the anger at the fact that he was taken from you. Feel the loss of him. Feel the sadness and the missing him. Don’t block it out, don’t cut so it so stops, don’t drink yourself numb. Just sit and let it all rip you apart. And then get up and keep breathing. One breath at a time. One day at a time. Wake up, and be shredded. Cry for a while. Then stop crying and go about your day. You’re not okay, but you’re alive, and you will be okay, someday.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“Fuck no, it’s not easy. It’s the hardest thing ever. But it’s the only way. What you’re doing is gonna kill you.”
I hear the personal knowledge of this in his voice. “You’ve done this.”
He sighs. “Yeah. More than once.”
“Kyle?”
“Him too.”
“Who else?”
He breathes out again, a long frustrated breath. “Friends. Brothers. A girl I…someone I loved.”
“Tell me.”
“Fuck. Really? You want to hear this now?” I nod and he growls in his chest. “Fine. The first one was one of my best buddies, Split’s and mine. T-Shawn. Split grew up next to him. T-Shawn and Split started the Five-One Bishops together. There was a rumble on a basketball court, a turf thing. Fists mainly, a few chains, one ass**le had a bat. Then it escalated. One of the other guys pulled a knife. Stabbed T in the f**king throat. I watched—watched him bleed out all over my hands, my arms. I watched T die, held him in my f**king arms as he bled out…and then I killed the motherfucker. Crushed his goddamn head against the court until I saw brains. Couldn’t stop myself. T was a good guy. A good friend. A gentle guy, really. But he had the bad luck to be born in the ghetto. Ain’t much you can do but what you gotta do to keep breathing. It ain’t even really a choice, for most. It’s just life. Life in the hood. How shit works. T was smart, man. Could have gone to college, written some smart shit, been someone, if he’d have had the opportunity. Didn’t. Now he’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Then another brother got shot. Lil Shady. We weren’t friends at first. His girl had a thing for me, which he didn’t like. I never did nothing with her, but…he didn’t like me for it. Eventually we got past that shit, and had each other’s backs when things got ugly. Shady took a slug to the head. Didn’t see that shit, thank god. But he was gone, and it sucked. Just…gone. I’d smoked a blunt with him an hour before he died, you know? And then Split and Mo were banging in my door, carrying Shady, yelling about some other gang doing a driveby.” He’s gone, his eyes vacant, seeing the past. “Couple others through the years, same shit different day. None as close as Shady and T, though.” He trails off and I realize he’s lost in the memory.
I tangle my fingers with his. “You said a girl, too? Someone you loved?”
“That was the worst day of my life. The reason I decided to quit the gang and live straight, buy the shop and try to get away from all that shit.” He ducks his head, buries his face into my curls, takes a deep breath. “Her name was India. So f**king beautiful. Her mom was black, her dad was Korean. Almond shaped eyes, long straight black hair down to her waist, body like—well, a damn fine one. Such a sweet girl. Too sweet to be living in the ghetto, to be caught up in the shit she was caught up in. She was friends with Split’s girlfriend. She was around a lot, and I’d noticed her. Seen her, liked her. Seen her looking at me. We finally ended up the last two awake after a party one night, hung out on the fire escape talking till dawn. She wanted to go to beauty school, or maybe be a model, she wasn’t sure which. Coulda been great at either.”
A long pause, then. Too long. I can’t fill it though. I wait for him.
“We dated for a year. Dated isn’t really the right word, ‘cause it wasn’t like I was taking her to Broadway and Little Italy or some shit, you know? We were together for a year, is what I meant. Fuck. I can’t talk about this.” His voice cracks, he takes a deep breath, lets it out, and continues. “Had some shit go down with a rival gang, a couple rumbles, whatever. Routine shit. It went bad. Got separated from Split and them, chased on foot for f**king miles by more guys than I could take alone. Didn’t mean to, but I led them to India. She was hanging with her girlfriends, couple of their guys. Sees me coming down the street, knew I was in trouble. Called the guys out to help. So the guys and I take care of things and I got hit in the shoulder, but whatever, wasn’t too bad. Last one was talking shit, but I could see he was ready to run. We let him. Fucking…he ran off, then stopped about a hundred feet away and blasted a shot, like a last ‘fuck you.’ India was on the porch, took it straight between the f**king eyes. Total freak accident. I could see the guy’s face. He was like ‘oh shit’, because everybody knew India. Didn’t matter who you belonged to, you knew India, you had to love her, respect her ass. She was that sweet. He got capped the next day, not me, but it happened. Didn’t matter though. She was gone. All that beauty, all that sweetness, all that love for everyone, no matter who you were…just gone.”