By Neva Knott

The lights were on the band and I was dancing next to the guy I like, feeling guilty that I like him and wondering what he’d do if he knew, because my boyfriend just died two months ago and they were friends.

I looked around that familiar room, a bit like the room that held our collective youth, and wanted to scream. Primal, loudly, and to let it be drowned by the sound of rock and roll. In that moment my mind shattered into pieces of some other reality that still included Andrew…our first public kiss in just about that spot, a time when jobs and money didn’t matter, the reality that preceded the twenty wasted years of my life.

As the lights flashed on stage and the song changed my mind came back into focus and my heart flashed on reality. This is my life, these are my people, in this room, and I don’t want to waste any more time elsewhere. I left it all behind by stepping away into adult life. Fuck that, it’s been a let-down.

Not that I want to be destitute and irresponsible. I want to feel alive. The whole time I taught, and went to bed at 10 PM and arose at 6 AM and spent evening upon evening on my couch using my own time to grade papers that were shit and most of them shouldn’t have come to me until they were better written by students who largely didn’t give a fuck as long as their parents weren’t on them about grades, I was lost and angry and miserable and sad.

Andrew was what I missed the most. He, by that point, had shaped my life as much as I myself had…he and my dad. I told him so in his dying moments before the morphine was hooked up, that he and my dad made me who I am. Andrew was always the center of the scene for me…even after I accepted loving him in the sense of all things are beautiful and one rather than being the girl with the biggest crush on him. All else was the backdrop, but I loved it all and valued it, too. The people, the bands, the late nights.

While pondering all of this I watched one of our friends watch the band and remembered that the last time he saw Andrew was the last time I saw Andrew–and he was dead. I wonder what that was like for our friend…in the moment, in the hospital, in that frozen moment, he said “oh buddy” over and over, with tears in his eyes.

What became clear or just made me want to scream last night as the band played on was that the times in my life I’ve felt guilty weren’t about something I was or wasn’t doing at work, or how much money I was–or more likely wasn’t–saving, or about accomplishing goals. It was that deep inside of me I knew that I was denying my true existence by unintentionally, though with resigned acceptance, walking away from all this love and friendship and creative purpose…this essence of life.

I admire the people who surrounded me last night, immensely, because they have not succumbed to that fear.

Acceptance and grief are funny things. They bite you in the ass when you least expect to be gnawed raw by their brutal teeth. All the usual commentary becomes trite…you know he loved you, no one knew he was so sick, we all wish we had more time, if he would have taken better care of himself, so sad that you two finally got together and now he’s gone. All trite, but all of it what we say to each other as salve for the bite marks.

I need to scream because I am over getting over shit. My list is long…I was hit by a car age seven and had to learn to walk again; I realized, in a hotel room in Saigon in the 70s at age eight, that my mother really didn’t like me and that we’d never get along; my father died when I was fifteen leaving me alone with that bitch; I took a profession and pushed at it and pushed at it and exhausted myself pushing at it for twenty years so that I wouldn’t have to call myself a failure. I lost touch of myself along the way, and then I met Adam and he died; I moved to Maui and failed professionally and left behind my dream of island life; a few years later I got laid off, then I got fired. I left Portland to return to Olympia, this time to manage my mom’s estate after she died–a move “home” that never works for me. And came back. And then I lost Andrew. And then I had to put my dog down, mercifully, because of his old age.

So I will scream, though sometimes silently in the lonely dead hours of the night when I am alone. And I will dance and let the music fracture my mind into a different reality, one filled with life and love, but none of that will fill the hole left by Andrew. This time, I know he’s not coming back from tour, I know I’m not going to run into him at a show, I know we won’t get together for a drink someday soon.

I will scream because I can’t fill the hole left in our world by Andrew’s death. I will dance because I am surrounded by all of this truth and beauty and love, because the people who died, died and I am alive.