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Is how I went to sleep smiling.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The funny thing about moments where your world comes crashing down around you…
Is that you have no idea that that’s what’s happening.
Denial has a funny way of shielding us when the first strike hits…
Making the fallout all the more slow. Painful.
Making you resent your brain for trying to cushion something that can’t be cushioned.
Muscle memory.
I heard it referred that way once—grief. How in a sense, it’s just our brains pulsing with memories and chemical connections, connections we call love…for something—someone who’s no longer there.
And never will be again.
But it takes time…
To form new connections. To get our brains to rewire, essentially.
Hence, the denial.
One day, I’ll look back on this moment—these first twenty-four hours, this first week, this first month….
And I’ll think:
Fuck, man. You had no idea.
I wake up from a heavy sleep to birds chirping.
Groaning, I roll over, burying my face in my pillow.
Exhaustion tugs at me, pulling me back under just as the chirping finally stops.
Only to begin again a moment later.
Frowning, I lift my head, squinting into the thinning darkness of my bedroom. Awareness pokes into the fog of sleep still trying to pull me down, and I realize it’s not birds chirping. But my phone ringing.
Grumbling under my breath, I knuckle the grit from my eyes and push up on my forearm, resting all my weight as I use my other one to blindly feel around the bed.
The phone stops ringing…
And immediately starts up again.
It’s then that I realize my heart is racing, and I’m breathing faster. My body reacting to some…unseen threat, before I even knew I had something to worry about.
I sit up fully and look around the bed, blinking rapidly to get my eyes to adjust.
Finally, I see it—right at the very corner of the mattress.
There’s a soft snore coming from the floor, and I glance down just as I grab my phone, remembering Waylon crashed here. He’s dead to the world. After how much he drank last night, he’s got to have a wicked hangover coming his way.
But when I see the name flashing on the screen, all thoughts of Waylon and his impending reckoning are forgotten, as everything just grinds to a halt.
It’s probably only seconds that I hold the phone in my hand, staring at it like it’s a bomb about to go off. But in that blip of time, an eternity passes, where my brain just sort of…fires off in all directions.
