Eulogy or is it That Time Again : Brian Nealon
I'D KNOWN HER for years before I realized I loved her. I remember the exact second I finally understood how deeply she ran in my mind and told her, involuntarily, that I wanted to marry her. We were sitting quietly and happily on the roof of one of those flat-topped apartment buildings in downtown Nashville and the stars were very bright, and I was absolutely ecstatic because I had just seen my first shooting star and for whatever reason I grabbed her hand and said it.
“I want to marry you,” I said with the tail end of a laugh still in my voice.
“I know,” she said, “I know you do,” and somehow I knew that she was going to leave that next morning, and sure enough when I woke up her side of the bed was empty and the few things she’d scattered around the apartment were gone and I didn’t even cry because I wasn’t absolutely sure she’d ever existed in the first place. She just disappeared, like a ghost in sunlight.
And as best I had tried to push her out of mind those next few years, it didn’t surprise me all that much to pick up the phone and hear her name. Her mother had called my number when she found it among her daughter’s possessions retrieved from the car crash. “It was the only number she carried in her address book,” she said, “so I thought you would like to know about… what happened.”
I scribbled down the funeral arrangements on the back of a hamburger wrapper and picked out my best suit and her favorite tie and drove the four hours to her hometown with her favorite song on repeat the entire way and I still couldn’t cry.
I pulled up to the funeral home half an hour before the service and let myself in to the room where the casket sat in front of rows and rows of modest white folding chairs, and I couldn’t help myself from walking right up to the front and putting a hand on the lid. I lifted the heavy oak and wasn’t at all surprised to see nothing but sandbags and the blue satin bottom.
I sat in the front row during the service and watched her family and not so many friends pass by the casket to lay flowers across it and I couldn’t help but think of how sad and lonely they must all be feeling, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything at all.
On the long drive home I could only imagine where she would be at that very moment, having escaped again from the people who loved her, and thought about how sometimes running away is the only comforting thing we have left, and I cried for the first time in five years.
CJ Krueger is on his way to completing a double major in Creative Writing and Theatre at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire.