Two Lucky

The sun felt good on my skin. That was my first thought. We were driving up to visit Rusty at the grave site. I had just spent the week with Rusty’s mom Peggy in Virginia, in the house he had grown up in. I slept in his old room, in his old bed. In a few hours I would be on the train back to New York. 

In my head I wondered if I would be able to keep it together. After a week in a house filled with memories of his life, I was feeling tired, drained from crying and not sleeping. The sun felt good. I clung to that thought.

The truck stopped. I got off. Peggy drove off. “I’ll just be a few minutes,” I had told her earlier. There wasn’t time to brace myself. I started crying again even before I reached the grave. I sat down next to him. I collected myself.

“Hey stud, how’s it going?” I smiled.

I brought with me some of Rusty’s favorite comestibles. Nachos from 7-Eleven. Cheez Whiz. Fiji water. I lit up a Parliament Light and put it in the ground, like an incense. I lit up another for myself.

In the noon heat I talked to Rusty as I would if he were alive. I told him about my upcoming trip to Singapore to see my parents. How I sat outside on our apartment’s fire escape for the first time last week. How the New York boys were beginning to strut the streets in the summer heat.

Being physically there with him, even though he wasn’t physically there, made me happy. I knew he was, too. He was right here. I lay down. I could feel his body on mine. I caressed the grass as I would his hair. I touched the headstone as I would his face. In the vast, open field of graves there were no other but the two of us. The sun is shining strong. He always loved the sun.

As our cigarettes burned down, the truck pulls up. I pull myself together. I sat up and said my goodbye. It was time to go.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 2:53 pm and is filed under New York. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.