PURGATORY

Winter of Grief

Felicia Rosemary Urso

DAY ONE

My dad only calls when someone dies. This week, it’s my godfather. My dad’s childhood best friend. I wish he’d called three, four, five months earlier, when he knew my godfather was sick. He never thought to tell me. I found out he was in the hospital three days before he passed, by chance, at my grandmother’s funeral. I asked my dad in the future to please tell me when someone is dying before they’re dead and he said nothing. That’s why my godfather was my father, but now he’s dead, and I’m left with something that is nothing. So many living dead things. Accepting someone’s consistency is key but someone’s yet to make me a copy.

I hung up the phone and drove to the ocean. I begged for a sign he loved me and nothing happened. It was the coldest day this winter. I took off my clothes and ran through the stale snow into the sea. I dunked my head and got saltwater in my mouth. I spit and pulled myself back to shore. I peeled off my wet boxers, stuffed my sandy feet into my Uggs and ran to my car. Snow started falling half-heartedly, like dandruff in light. I’m see-through from heaven. I bet he loves viewing my broken heart, trapped in my glass display-case body. He loved giving me gifts like they were enough proof. This is no different.

I got the idea so I did it. The shock dulled nothing. It didn’t distract me. I was screaming in the water, screaming in the car, screaming on the floor of the bathroom in a ball. I didn’t think people reacted like that, until I did. Like saying no over and over could buy me more time to waste. My skin was the last thing to thaw, besides my chest, which won’t. I wrote that sentence while it was happening, because sometimes writing is easier than living. Constructing distance into a moment to survive it. In my mom’s shower I laid down and put my head on the tile. I noticed a white feather smeared to the floor. I need more from him, but that’s nothing new.

ADRIFT

I sat in warm sugar water, preparing to see my first dead body. The glycerin dried my skin out but I love an excuse to scrub myself away. I love a bad cycle I can tell myself is for the best. I haven’t felt like myself once this winter. Falling into fantasy while people die feels insane, but is keeping me sane. February is when I’m most invisible. Even starving doesn’t make me happy. Little pockets of fat cling to my gut and waist, proof I’ve done no work to deserve this. I’m not fit, I’m vanishing in chunks. Sleeping under three weighted blankets is doing something to my psyche I won’t understand until I’ve done it too long. I’ve never been thinner or heavier. Like when I did poppers for the first time, I’m afraid my brain is just like this now.

In his obituary, “He was a loving and devoted godfather” because that sounded better than “He called his goddaughter a bitch a lot when she stopped doing what he wanted.” He never married, never had children of his own. From as far back as I remember, he promised he would leave everything to me. “You’re all I have. I have no one else but you.”

After he passes, in a dream, he tells me, “Never having children is my life greatest regret.” We’re in an Italian restaurant, like always. He won’t let me buy him an espresso martini. He’s too sick from the chemo to even drink. He’s looking at the table. “Well, I’m like your daughter.” I love him so much, its pulsating out from me, like wet warm clouds. I’m trying to get them to reach him. His hair is still black, like his eyes. He finally looks at me. “But you aren’t.”

IN THE SPACE THAT’S LEFT

I held the corpse’s hand when we were alone and asked if he forgave me. I’ve done nothing unforgivable, like he has, and yet, here we are. It’d been so long since I’d seen him, I thought there was a mistake. That couldn’t possibly be the body that once knew mine. I imagined picking him up, draping him around my neck and wearing him forever. My destiny and my punishment. I cannot handle another lesson, but a living poem, perhaps. He is so old and I am only six. When I was born, they put me into his arms and told me it was my job to hold him. I grew, carrying a man who scorned me when I needed shelter. I fear how I’d float if the weight were taken away, but even death can’t do that.

A woman entered into him, through the opening my wake left. She tells me not to worry. He was well taken care of. I don’t have the energy to tell her that’s not my point. She thinks her daughters loved him more than me, but she doesn’t know why I needed to stay away. Maybe they do. She won’t unlock his house for me, the house that is plastered in framed photos of me, ages zero to twelve. How could she forget to call me, when I was right there? I want a sweater to crawl into and she wants me to crawl back from where I came.

Realizing I hadn’t cried today made me cry. I want to get in the ocean again but if I do I won’t come out. I want to go back, but I don’t know where to. Lauren tells me an abused child is more likely to choose who hurt them over neglect. It was never right, but it was something. It was mine, until it wasn’t.

BUT DOCTOR, I AM PAGLIACCI

My father didn’t look at me at the funeral. That morning was this year’s first big snowstorm. He would have loved that, all of us forced out into a blizzard to cry for him. I wasn’t invited to walk in with The Family, even though he told me I was his only family. But in my absence, he found others to adore, and though that should comfort me, I’m ill with jealousy and want. A goddaughter should be a guide to the altar, if nothing else.

I kneeled in the pews, my blood on fire, churning hot bile, as the woman’s daughter read from the Bible, twice. It should have been me. The shoulds surround me, put me back onto my knees in a corner. It would have been so easy to include me, so many times. I couldn’t look straight ahead. I stared to the side, at the confession booth, ceiling, casket. I stood in the church and imagined pushing my father to the asphalt in the parking lot. I doubt he would fight me but I wish he would. He doesn’t care enough to punch back. He snuck out the side door as the service was ending. As he peeled out I flipped him off, to make my mom laugh. I prayed to have my anger relieved from me because I have nowhere to put it. Take it away, please. Take me with it.

The day after the funeral, my dad texted me and my brother “Lunch tomorrow?” Then, “Oops, meant for Luke.” Everything is unnecessary. I’m already buried. What’s another load of dirt?

NO MORE SURPRISES

I start a story with, “When my dad died…” before realizing he, technically, is not dead yet. Looking through old photos, every Christmas morning my godfather is on the floor with me in my pastel nightgowns, surrounded by Barbies, wrapping paper and books, and my father is nowhere in frame. When I was little, my godfather and I talked about how disgusting cigarettes are, until I found his Marlboro Reds hidden in the middle console of his car. When I was sixteen, he bought Camel Wides for me and let me smoke them in his blue BMW on our weekly date. I knew I was starting to get too old, even then. I don’t know what to see in all this absence, so I look for God. I wait for night to come. It’s over, but it’s not.

I left my godfather voicemails when he was in the ICU he’ll never listen to. I’m relived to no longer be a daughter. I tell myself it’s freedom as I spin out to where I can’t breathe. I will get what I deserve, which is nothing. It is so much easier to be angry about objects and strangers than at two men who don’t think of me. I feel entitled, but what does anyone owe another person, really? So, when he leaves me out of his will completely, and when I see my dead dog’s twin at Walmart, and when another obituary of another man I loved from looking up comes out, I am not surprised. My blood pressure doesn’t spike. Look up the definition of even keeled: there I am. By being left nothing, written out, perhaps I am being spared of more strings, more debt and more fathers. The worst kind of tab is the kind you can’t pay back in cash. It’s tiring, keeping my side clean, but I will do it to owe nothing. This is the last time I’ll clean up after my punishment. I’m nauseous as my brain skips, trying to process more and more and more death. When we met, Gian told me, “Sex, drugs and death are the holy trinity, but there’s a reason fireworks only last a few minutes.”

I don’t want to be seen so I will keep making whoever’s left laugh. All this squinting has me ragged, but sleeping and sunlight make me feel guilty. I’m afraid of his visits and fear what he will say during them. I’m scared of the truth, which is I will continue living, limping toward a horizon where no one waits to greet me.