Once More We Saw Stars : A Memoir (9781524733544) by Greene Jayson

Author:Greene, Jayson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2019-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

Four

searching for home

RETURNING FROM KRIPALU, WE ARE FACED finally with the rootlessness of our lives. It is nearly Thanksgiving, and for the past six months we have lived for nothing. The absence of meaning has been comforting in a way. We must like the feeling, because we keep doubling down on it: having lost Greta, it seems, we are experimenting with how much of ourselves we can harrow away and still technically exist.

First to go was our home. Greta was everywhere in it, padding agreeably around every corner. Being in our apartment where she was not, walking past the closed door of her empty bedroom and averting our eyes to use the bathroom, was unendurable. The grief books all said not to make any radical changes for at least a year after catastrophic loss. We quickly decided this was bullshit.

By July, Stacy had taken the lead, sorting real estate listings according to price, to neighborhood, to number of bedrooms, to condominium vs. co-op. In moments of great transition in our lives, I tended to become cargo: Stacy would plot the course, and if I had the presence of mind, I scrambled for the rudder. There was something spiritual in her ability to map the contours of our future, to trace its corners and wrestle with its logistics, before it came into view. There has to be something up ahead in this blackness, so let’s start taking measurements.

Her real estate search occupied most of her free hours, and the rest of her time was spent getting rid of paint cans, old sweaters, electronics. The clutter that I had pushed to the top shelves of our closets on her orders suddenly began whispering to her, and I found myself on a ladder, dragging it all back down to the carpet. We dropped bags of our old clothes at recycling; we got rid of stray connectors and RCA cords. At night, we sat on the couch as Stacy scrolled through listings. We liked this floor plan; we didn’t like how old that building was; there had to be a reason that one was that cheap; oh my god, the maintenance on this building was insane. “I only want to throw things away and look at real estate,” Stacy declared to me.

There was something else alive in the air between us—something we’d been too afraid to prematurely identify as “hope,” but we recognized the weather conditions for it. One night, while discussing the move, Stacy said it: “We can’t do it all over again here.”

I had already discovered this thought living in my heart: I wanted to be a father again. But I did not simply want to be “a father” again. I wanted to be Greta’s father. I liked Greta’s father. Greta’s father was bursting with pride and happiness, even when he was exhausted and frazzled. Sometimes I still expected to look up and see Greta and me laughing and walking together down the block, as if observing my old self from a great distance.

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