Conversations With My Grandfather.

With the edge of my boot, I kicked up a cloud of red dirt. I hadn’t yet decided whether I wanted to sit or stand. But I had a lot to say.

I paced a few steps and found a stump. Looking left and then right, I surveyed my surroundings. Sure that I was really alone, I took a seat on top of it.

The sun was beating down on my back, neutralizing the cool breeze that drew goosebumps on my skin. And I breathed deep, letting the tears I’d held at bay all day fall lazily down my face.

“You know, I thought I had everything under control back then…” I trailed off thinking about last summer. The darkest season of my life. “Life was going like I wanted. I had everything like I wanted it. I had it all figured out.” My laugh is bitter. And pathetic.

My voice carries more anger than I intended. “I wasn’t ready. I know you were… I know you were. But I wasn’t… What am I suppose to do with you now?”

With the back of my sleeve, I swipe at my running nose.

“I’ve made a lovely mess, don’t you think?” With that, fresh hot tears stream down their previously made paths.

Oh, the mess I’d made. I knew it. I knew he knew it, too. Somewhere, he knew it.

The nightmares, the panic attacks, the sudden move to Chattanooga, the divorce, the fights with dad, the inability to find a job, the inability to take what’s left of my life and redraft, revise.

If life were as easy as rearranging words on a page…

And the thought of facing death. Again. And so soon.

I look towards the empty patch of ground I’m talking to, “It’s selfish, right?” I nod my head. Because, whether he would ever tell me or not, I know it’s true.

Life is what it is. And when it’s time to let go. You let go.

In theory.

But watching her, everyday, withering slowly away. A slow fade. The smell of death in the air, suffocating my soul and making it hard to breathe.

That tired look in her eyes that mirrors that look I saw in his. The color’s different. But the weariness is the same.

I sense the landslide coming. And I’m gasping for my last few remaining breaths before it buries me.

Again.

“I never really let you go… Now, I’m suppose to be ready to do it all over again..?” It came out as a sob.

I couldn’t tell you truthfully if I was crying for myself and my life or the thought of burying my grandmother.

Or for Pawpaw.

As I sit and stare at the rock that now stands as the reminder that he once lived, I decide that I despise it. And I despise those fake flowers that make it look like someone’s pretending it’s a coffee table, which needs to be adorned.

But I stand and walk over to pick up a fallen flower. As I stick it back into the immovable rock vase, I find it funny.

An everlasting vase for flowers, real or fake, that will wither and bend and blow away with the wind.

Like an everlasting gravestone for a soul that is not tethered to it. But a soul that I still feel on Sunday afternoons, and when looking at my dad’s face, or when hearing my Nannie’s laughter.

Absent mindedly I pat his gravestone, as I slowly begin to back away.

I wipe my face as I walk back to my car, ready to be gone. But I hear his voice, “You don’t have to come here to feel me, Armandy.”

“Yeah, I know, Pawpaw. I feel you everywhere.”