45.

Sunday morning, I’m in bed, drifting in and out of a fitful sleep, an attempt to escape reality, but knowing I’m now at a time in the morning I have to face the day. That truth ushers in an unnavigable dread – this knowing that there’s maybe sixteen waking hours where I have to live in this new reality, but it’s a reality that I don’t want any part of.

The worst thing is I don’t see an end to this. Even my relationship with Lana, as inexorable as it might’ve seemed when I was in it, always felt finite. This doesn’t. All that remains is the infinity of this one unswerving truth – Autumn’s dead and I’m here – and that truth fucking sucks.

Hauling myself out of bed, I do my morning things: pee, wash my hands and face, then make breakfast, although it’s tasteless and I eat out of habit. Autum’s not going to eat again. That’s a weird little observation to make. She’ll be forever still. Some people shouldn’t be. This is an incongruity. I go sit on the couch, but don’t put the television on, and just can’t process that either.

Grabbing my phone, I check social Facebook, and find Dennis has published a post announcing Autumn’s untimely death. The likes, sad faces, care icons and love hearts under the post are a pestilence in good taste. This is what we’ve reduced grieving, too: an emoji. Fucking hell. I foresee a future where we talk in shortcuts, where I imagine Shakespeare writing things such as:

To 😊 or 😒. That is the 🤔.

My mind’s squirreling away, trying to distract itself, but these stupid thoughts orbit a vortex – an oily black hole of grief. It’s going to suck me in. I know it, know where my mind goes at times under duress.

In my experiences with depression, I’ve learned one truth: keep moving. So that’s what I do now, showering, then doing my grocery shopping, but these behaviours are all rote. I don’t even get angry at the moron who cuts across from the wrong lane to turn into the plaza, or the multiple people doddering about like they’ve been strategically placed to annoy me.

Back at home, I find I’ve received various texts and messages from people offering me condolences, or support should I need it, which is nice – at least this is real. A lot of these people I speak to infrequently, or only reacquaint at gatherings. I wonder how many would follow through with offers to get together should I suggest it.

Sitting in front of the computer, I try to write, and it goes much like the shopping – I do it out of habit, although I’m not committed to it and it’s most likely a thundering shitfest. There’s something missing here – not just Autumn, but something else I can’t grasp. But that’s been my life as I know it.

About late afternoon, I surrender any pretence that I can function and go sit in the bathtub, wondering what it would be like to draw water, then slash my wrists. How does that even work? That must’ve been popular when razor blades were a thing, but I can’t recall the last time I saw one. Now it’s also razor heads. I could scratch myself nastily with one of those.

But the reset seems the thing, whatever the risk. If I come back to this point where Autumn’s gone, then I’ll deal with whatever the repercussions are, although I’m thinking more and more that I should reset, come back and if I find she’s here, leave again, and take one of the fucking doors Luca offered – just be done with this.

🤷‍♂️

Unfortunately, there’s the stupid thing with ego, with hope, and with the chemistry they create when mixed, because I want to believe in some possibility, no matter how miniscule, that things might change. The chemistry’s combustible. That’s what I’m looking for.

All those days I woke with depression, and/or anxiety, all those days where each moment was a clusterfuck of torment, this excruciating, inexorable, inescapable agony, I keep pushing forward because it’s all I could do, and I expected some explosion of good things, of happiness, of successes. But maybe that pursuit sums everything up.

Life becomes habit.

I don’t have a razor, but I have a toaster – a new one. That would do the trick for electrocution. And there’s the easier options I have with my sedatives, which I had prescribed under the conceit that I might need them due to the occasional anxiety flare, but which I got for just this prospect.

The doorbell rings. I sit up in the tub, unsure who’d be here. Autumn, I hope, although that’s impossible. She used to drop by, and we’d take a walk and chat. That’s done now. No more chatting. No more walks. No more Autumn ringing the doorbell.

I get out of the tub.

Stumble through the dog leg of my short hallway.

Walk through the living room.

Possibilities rage in my mind – it has to be one of the people who’ve offered me condolences. Or one of the people yet to offer condolences who’s decided to next level it and drop by. Or, possibly, it’s a group of emojis come to life to do the work we’re too lazy to do.

I open the door.

Lana.

“I heard about Autumn,” she says. “I thought you might want some company.”

I invite her in, then end up making a cup of tea for each of us; then we sit on the couch, and she tells me a friend of a friend of hers saw Dennis’s post, and told her about it, and she deliberated whether to call or drop by or if we were so broken up that she shouldn’t do anything. I’m still stuck on which friend Lana has that would see anything belonging to Dennis or Autum.

For a while, there’s not a lot of talk; I’m still lost in the shock of it all, and Lana seems unsure what her role is. Given our argument, I guess our relationship status would seem done, but that’s happened so often before who knows when done is done? Anyway, here she is, and you would think she’d offer a hug or something. If Lana had died, Autum would’ve offered a hug.

Somewhere during our relationship, all those things that are natural to relationships – kisses hello and goodbye; hugs; just those random touches, like stroking a partner’s back as you passed them – fell away, lost in whatever carnage our arguments wreaked, scarred into something that could never be again.

“It’s hard accepting it,” Lana says. “I know it was like that when my dad died.”

Here’s somewhere she can empathise, because she’s experienced it, although her dad passed from a long illness. It obviously doesn’t make it easier to ultimately lose them, but there’s some preparation. When my father passed after a long, debilitating battle with dementia, it was a mercy, as well as a release – he’d died when the dementia stopped him from functioning; his body just had to catch up.

“It’s like you know it’s real,” Lana goes on, “but you struggle to process it as real.”

I feel almost like I should lean into her, give her the cue to put her arm around me or something like that.

“It’s worse obviously when it’s a family member.”

And there. Done.

“I don’t think it matters whether they’re family or not,” I say. “It depends on the relationship.”

“Naturally it’s going to be worse when it’s blood.”

This is a nasty habit she has – this one-upmanship, like her comparative experiences are always worse than mine. She doesn’t even realise she does it, and writing this I see a real narcissism in it – this need to be the centre of attention even when an issue’s not about her.

And I see why all those relationship thingies – all those exchanges of affection – didn’t fall away, as I said early, but were tormented to death because they could no longer exist in the environment our dynamics had cultivated.

She hung on because … I don’t know – obsession, maybe, because whenever we were in the relationship, I only ever seemed to disappoint her, either in action, or in my outlook, or in the way I thought. And I was trying to recapture something that existed at the beginning of the relationship, and would reappear fleetingly, never identifying those periods were the outlier.

With Autumn dead, it contextualizes the relationship as a tremendous waste of fucking time, a forlorn and hopeless aspiration, like telling yourself you’ll beat a terminal illness just by thinking positive thoughts all the time, and you wake up months later to find the terminal illness couldn’t give a flying fuck about your delusions.

I don’t say anything, though, because I just don’t have the energy or the inclination, and I know if I was to counter her view (or if I tried), this is just going to escalate into one of our cyclical arguments, and I just don’t have the energy now.

“Do you want me to stay over?” Lana asks.

I’m tempted to accept the offer, but feel I want the privacy of my grief – especially given I don’t even think I can share it with Lana because she’d silently be measuring how commensurate my grief is with that friendship.

“Thanks for the offer,” I say. “But, well, I don’t know – it’s okay, I guess. I mean I’ll be okay.”

She’s no doubt analysing that response too and what it means. There’s a scene in the original Terminator movie where the Terminator has just fixed his injured arm and his face, and the damaged flesh must smell because the landlord knocks on the door and asks if he has a dead cat in the room; a list of possible responses comes up for the Terminator to choose from. I see such a list appearing in Lana’s head.

“All right,” she says. “I should get going, but if you need anything, call, okay?”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

She does give me a hug on the doorstep, but there’s no kiss or anything, because as bizarre as our relationship has been, it’s somewhere new now.

But new doesn’t mean better, and bizarre feels about right.