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“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said softly, the cemetery sprawling around me. “Why am I like this? I was fine. I was doing fine. I thought . . . I thought I was different now. I really thought I was fine, man.”
“This about Rhys? What happened?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. Ever since he left I’m . . .” My voice was so low I wasn’t sure he could even hear me. I reached out a hand to the nearest tombstone, needing to feel something solid. “I feel fucked up, man. It just kinda . . . snuck up on me. I really, really thought I was okay now,” I said again.
“Bro, listen. I’m not that shocked you’re feeling messed up. Probably feels like he abandoned you. Like, you know, like before.”
The world went gray, and it was hard to hear over the whoosh of blood in my ears.
“Matt. Matty? Grim!”
“Yeah.”
“You there?”
I was choking, and my mouth tasted sour.
“He didn’t abandon me; he’s on tour and he’s coming back.” The words came out in a desperate rush.
“I know that, Matty. Your boy’s hella in love with you. Course he’s coming back. Just saying, sounds like you’re tweaking cuz you feel all those old feels, you know?”
Right. It was just an echo. An uncomfortable reminder. The emptiness in the house that rang out like a hollow bell. The deafening buzz of a housefly in the corner. The prickling feeling of perpetual nothing stretching out in four dimensions. The nauseating familiarity as my body changed back to accommodate them again.
“Yeah.”
“Hey, man. You want me to come there? I could find a bus and—”
“Naw, man, it’s okay. But thanks. I . . . thanks. For real.”
“You gonna tell Rhys how bad it is?”
“No, it’s . . . I don’t wanna mess up his tour. He’s killing it, having such a good time. He’s so happy out there. And he . . . this is his dream, bro. The music and being married. I can’t . . . I can’t ruin one of them for him with the other. Besides, I’ll be fine when he gets back.”
I could practically see Grin doing the lip-biting thing he did when he wasn’t saying something he wanted to say, so I waited.
“I get it. But wouldn’t he wanna know? You said he likes to know everything, and . . . and it’s not like he won’t go on more tours in the future, right?”
My stomach roiled. Of course he would want to tour again. Fuck. I set my jaw.
“Then I guess I better get used to being okay when he’s gone.”
* * *
—
But I wasn’t okay.
That night I woke from a nightmare where Rhys had no face. It was just the back of his head, and when I spun him around it was the same on the other side. His voice sounded normal, comforting, kind, but it was coming from nowhere.
The next night I dreamt that he walked me to the cemetery, to the grave where the Ramones filmed their music video. He grinned the grin that lit up my heart, and then he took me by the hand and put me in the grave. He was still smiling as the first shovelful of dirt hit my face.
The night after that, I dreamed of the headless horseman. He was huge and cloaked in black and his horse had no head either, so it rampaged around the house, terrified, breaking windows and smashing into walls, leaving smacks of blood and the scent of fear. The horseman was silent, riding out the horse’s bucking frenzy with an otherworldly calm. Then he dismounted next to my bed and clapped a black-gloved hand over my mouth. With the other hand he pressed on my breastbone until my ribs snapped one by one.
After that, I didn’t sleep anymore. I threw myself into work with a desperate zeal. I roamed the city streets and took a late train home, then I turned on every light in the cottage, trying to banish the shadows, and settled on the couch with a blanket wrapped around me. I reread all my favorite books and watched terrible television. I played mindless, brightly colored games on my phone. I took cold showers when I felt drowsy and went for runs in the morning to wake myself up before work.
And then I did it all over again.
I listened to Rhys’s album on repeat, letting the sound of his voice sink into me, letting the threads of our story twine themselves around me.
“Back Row” was about a time we went to a midnight screening of a trashy seventies sci-fi flick and the film had burned halfway through, a black spot consuming itself onscreen. In the song, we watch the burning over and over with every chorus. In real life, I’d jumped as the theater was plunged into darkness, and Rhys had made a joke about the aliens’ ray guns hitting a little too close to home.
