Famous Blue Raincoat

I remember when I started to cross from agnostic to atheist.

I have replayed the moment my grandma died in my head so many times--Grandpa on her right, me on her left, the respirator engaging less and less, her hand colder and colder, him calling her, his voice more and more desperate. Each time we would think she was gone, her chest would rise again.

Until it didn't.

If there were something else, something more, I felt that we would have known it. There was no sense of a soul leaving, nothing but a body that slowly ceased to work.

In a way, realizing that I was an atheist gave me a sort of peace. Not believing in God at all makes this world oddly more comprehensible. The rules may be legion, varied and bizarre, but the rules exist. And we can uncover them.

725 days after her death, I finished up my performance at the local nonprofit theater. It was a small part; my role at the reception was not so much "cast member" as "theater volunteer and cheerleader." But it was fun.

He kept staring at me--not in that creepy kind of way, but in a "hey, you're interesting" way. A friend of a friend, we were introduced with, wow, can't believe you guys never met before.

We started with the philosophical underpinnings and implications of code.

We moved on.

Music (punk). Communism (oh yeah, I read that when I was 13 too. The Reagan years, you know?). My favorite Simpsons quote (my cat's breath smells like cat food, ralph wiggum) until we threw one obscure cultural/artistic/intellectual reference after another, waiting to see what was missed.

Finally I said: Omaha the Cat Dancer.

Good story, kind of melodramatic, too bad they broke up and didn't finish it.

I'm not sure if it was our meeting, or his phone message a couple weeks later (beep. happy thursday. happy thursday. happy thursday. click) that made it inevitable for me. Apparently my cat's breath smells like cat food did it for him--his coworkers said he would repeat it, randomly, at work and just laugh....

One morning as I was trying to pry myself out from under his featherbed into a cold commute, he opened his eyes, smiled, and said my name, drifting immediately back to sleep.

I think I started to become an agnostic again when he smiled at me. But I was still an atheist, until he left me.

The very concept of love has always felt ridiculous to me--I know how much work a relationship is, having seen my parents and both sets of my grandparents, all of whom developed strong, loving, relationships. My love life's been a bit of a mess. Sure, I was crazy about my first boyfriend; but after all, i was 14 at the time, and you feel things so intensely then, you know? First love is intense. I do believe it could have developed into something else, but, we were so young and it was so long ago.

I never expected to feel anything like that again. And then I did.

I did not delude myself that he was perfect. Far from it. But to be making wedding plans?! To care about a wedding at all?! Ridiculous. I'm not 19. Or even 25. And granted, the worlds "plaid" and "steampunk" were thrown about more than "princess" and "magical" but still. His grandmother called me the "love of his life." Friends wondered at how there could possibly be two people so perfect for each other in this world.

I love to talk… I will talk to anyone about anything. But I had long since realized that most people neither wish to nor are able to discuss what I most want to discuss. This had been fine—there is so much to discover, so much of wonder in this world, that I’m happy to talk about, well, almost anything.

Him I could actually talk to.

Then he told me he had nothing to offer me. Forgot to put in for our vacations. It was as if, one day, he shut down and slipped away. He was there but... not.

Once, he said that he had "problems with all this destiny shit." I didn't blame him. I'm not big on the whole "fate" thing myself. I'm too prickly, too independent, too obsessed with self-reliance. So I told him to think of it more as a statistical improbability--that two people as odd as we are could find someone equally as odd, within a given geographic area and age range.

When he finally left me for good, I had insomnia for eight months. In the worst dream, we're in the car. he's driving; we're both singing along to the Dead Kennedys or that silly brazilian band he loved, at the top of our lungs. Laughing. I can turn and see his wrist on the steering wheel. I never dare look up to his face. I wake up and I feel empty. It wasn't until I could remember the dreams that I could start sleeping again.

In August I wrote him a love letter--not to fix things, but to mark that they had existed in the first place. The day I was to send it, I found out that he and his new girlfriend had flown away on a trip. The new girlfriend was an expected outcome; the trip induced rage: he'd sworn to me--who adores travel--that he'd never get on a plane again.

One day, not long after, my mother asked me if I regretted knowing him. If I wished it had never happened.

Oh no. Oh no. I am happy we had what little we had.

In my mind, we were in the car again. I’m holding the iPod, spin it to Sheela Na Gig; his grandfather’s gold bracelet on his wrist, the green dangling net from his rear view mirror. I look up at him, he smiles, and my fantasy of a clockwork universe slipped away.

Instead of looking for my grandma's soul in her fading body, I should have just listened to my grandpa's voice.