HOLY SHIT NEW POST

Here are all 2460 words of my in-progress. More to come. This one's for you, Al.

THE BLUE NOTEBOOK

I lived in the lake house that my grandmother had left for me, solely me, after she died on the anniversary of her heart escaping our atmosphere. My grandfather died five days short of seventy-six, and my grandmother lived five years to the day after that, knitting in the recliner in which her husband had spent three years dying. In the months following his death, she remained the epitome of strength that she had been during the treatments. Her worried children, my aunt, uncle, and mother, had visited her profusely to be reassured that she was surviving in the wake of granddad’s death. She, like the lily-of-the-valleys that she loved so dearly, was thriving. I knew better of the pain that haunted her heart.
My grandfather was always a vibrant man. He had served in the United States Army during the Korean War, functioning as an infantryman and flame-thrower operator for a single four-year tour of duty. He had been awarded nothing more than the basic enlistment medals and remuneration. After the war, at age twenty-two, he was offered a position with the Detroit Tigers, playing catcher for their minor-league farm team. By this time, he had met my grandmother and had asked for her hand in marriage; his first daughter was on the way. Though still a well-paying job, professional sports in his time were not nearly as lucrative as they are now, so he declined the offer for what he saw as a much more stable living: working for General Motors in the Power Houses. The pension he picked up from more than twenty years of service for GM would enable him to fund a family of five with little hardship; a supplemental pension from Michigan State University, gained by working there for several years, helped him to retire comfortably at age 65.
The relationship that he had with my grandmother was a golden one. She was the traditional housewife, leaving her modestly-paying job as a soda jerk behind when she was just nineteen to start a family with my grandfather-to-be, a man whom her father disapproved of greatly. They loved legendarily, and she raised her three children fairly and lovingly even while he worked more than fifty hours a week to support them comfortably. When he did not work, they threw parties and soaked up life in the way that a family that works hard would: hard, vivaciously, and often. Before I knew her, the drink she most often chose was Southern Comfort; he liked Black Rose on the rocks. She was a typical Southern Belle, with no siblings, and a strong lineage. After the children left home to start families of their own, my grandparents enjoyed lives that only stoked the fires of their romance for one another, taking trips to Aruba, Gulf Shores, and Papua New Guinea, among others. Theirs was a love stronger than those tragic lovers, Tristan and Isolde, or Romeo and Juliet; it was also less ill-fated.
For twenty-six years, they had lived together alone. There were, of course, intervals of greater population in the house, particularly during the summer and on holidays, but for the most part she lived every day speaking to him and he speaking to her. They had friends, no doubt, and spent enough time away from one another to remain sane, but their separation was never greater than the span of a quarter of a day. When my grandfather died, my grandmother’s entire paradigm shifted; she was irrevocably alone. I cannot say that I truly understand the depth of her loneliness, ineffable as it is, but I could see the depth of her sorrow. Others saw in her longing gaze a desire to move on and continue. I saw a desire to return and die with him.
What my parents and extended family mistook for looking to the future I recognized as classical grieving. Following the death of a lover, the remaining spouse often fights for change, struggles for air in the stifling remnants of their now-dead marriage. They redecorate the living room, change the kitchen, tear up carpeting and lay down wood flooring, or move to Italy to escape the monotony and the winters that punctuated his worst moments of illness. My grandmother sold the vehicle that had transported her and my grandfather back and forth between house and hospital five times a week, every week, for three years. It was a 2006 Chevrolet Trailblazer, in metal-flaked charcoal, with dark grey seats. The vehicle she bought was nothing drastically different, but instead a new iteration of the same thing: a 2009 Trailblazer, this time in merlot. She had not changed severely, it seemed. She still saw old friends, played cards with them on long winter nights, sipping Riunite-and-7-Up, on the rocks, as they fought back the acknowledgment of their mortalities. She still crocheted me afghans and hats and scarves, still made peanut-butter fudge for my mother’s work-sponsored Christmas parties, still baked my father molasses cookies with a little snippet of whiskey, and still made sure not to cook eggs for my uncle when he lived with her for a few weeks to finish a construction job near the house. She entertained my love, Allie, by re-teaching her the art of crocheting, ate sparsely, like a sparrow, and watched Regis and Kelly every morning, even if she had seen it before. Not much was altered.
Then, she took off for Italy. It was the week after my graduation, where she had come with her 35-millimeter camera with genuine Kodak film to capture that moment for posterity. I choked up when I walked to the podium to receive my diploma because I saw her next to an empty seat, his ticket taped to the seat. It reminded me that he would never give my wife the necklace she had been aching for and that I could not afford, simply because he “had nothing else to spend it on,” would never hold my cooing child in his arms and suggest burlesque names, would never teach my daughter to throw a pitch properly or show my son the art of ice-fishing. I moved home after school to be closer to her, at least for those few months in the summer when I was not absorbed in my education.
A week I had been sleeping in the back bedroom, waking up to cool mornings, going to the park to run, and coming back to a house warmed by fresh biscuits and coffee. We talked for hours each day – it seemed as if she had been keeping her words pent up inside, with no one around to talk to – and she always reminded me how nice it was to finally have someone around the house. She showed me the upkeep of the place, where to dump the lawn trimmings, where the ladders were for each operation that was too tall for my short frame, how she liked the flowers arranged outside. I had no indication that she would buy a one-way ticket to Tuscany the Saturday after I moved in with her. I woke that morning to already-made breakfast, a full one, with eggs, bacon, buttered toast, apple butter, and hot coffee. She knew I did not eat until after I ran.
“I’m moving to Italy,” she told me soberly. I saw that she had already packed everything she needed.
“But why? Where will you go?”
“The Donnas have a house there, which they sold me for next to nothing. Don’t worry, I’ve paid everything off here. You can stay as long as you like. I just need to see things before my time. You understand, right?”
I nodded slowly. I understood. I had needed to take the time off at school before I could come back to the house, and it had taken me a solid six months to come home to the house where I had spent so much of my life. Sometimes, it takes a drastic change.
“Please be careful, Grandma. Call now and then, but just enjoy yourself.” I had tears in my eyes.
“You sound like me four years ago.”
Our embrace was long and tearful. When we disentangled ourselves from one another, she held me at arms’ length and smiled grimly. “I will keep in touch, honey. Take care of yourself, now?”
I nodded. Words escaped me.
Within the hour, she was gone. The Donnas had arrived to pick her up and bring her to the airport in Traverse City, roughly a ninety-minute drive, so she could leave me with a vehicle if I needed it. She left behind the brand-new Trailblazer, on which she had only put two hundred miles, and had single-handedly ensured that I would have a place to live without fearing for my finances. I put the food she had prepared into the refrigerator, knowing my appetite was slain, and sat disbelieving on the couch. A chill breeze came through the open windows; outside, the oft-calm lake was rolling with whitecaps, the surf crashing angrily on the sandy shore, pulverizing the remnants of dead fish and abandoned snail-shells. I pulled my worn cardigan closer about me, feeling my grandmother’s fingertips in the innumerable places where she had touched the wool whilst crocheting it for me. My shivers would not cease, and my tears would not fall.

CHAPTER 2

The clock struck eleven before I awoke the next morning, still strewn uncomfortably along the length of my grandmother’s couch. I supposed it was now my couch. A burning hunger bit into my thoughts, reminding me that I had neglected to eat for a day now. Sitting up, I gazed outside and noted the warmth that was beginning to seep into the lowest points of the day. I needed to go run to relieve the sorrow in my heart.
The back bedroom where I had been sleeping was much as I had left it, disarrayed and looking much like a freshman dormitory room. I ignored the mussed covers and deposed pillows in my single-minded desire for running. My shirt, long-sleeved, grey cotton, well-worn, had accompanied me on many medal-winning runs in my college days; the shorts, too short, were likewise accustomed to my body. The two fit together better than I could imagine, the lower hem of the shirt sitting perfectly atop the elastic waistband of my shorts. I dressed quickly and pulled on my trail shoes and tied them quickly. The house was closing in on me.
When I stepped outside, the sunny day that had greeted me from the couch had dissolved into a dark, brooding, overcast afternoon. Clouds swelled and roiled above me, waiting to have the rain wrung viciously from them that they might soak me and wash me clean of my sorrow. I locked the door and put the key into my shorts’ key pocket and started to run.
No birds uttered a single cry even as I started down the road and disturbed their wistful rest. All that was heard was my breathing, still calm and even, and the rhythmic crunching of compressing gravel and soil beneath my shoes. The waves had silenced and the wind was dead, and the clouds were that bubbling color of a television tuned to dead air. I felt comfortable along the road, began to feel my legs warming from the exertion, felt sweat on my back beginning to pearl. It was becoming more humid, and the clouds sagged, pregnant with precious rain. My muscles twitched eagerly, awaiting the electric discharge of the growing storm above me.
A mile passed in this manner, and the hormonal electrification was beginning to exhaust me. I turned off the road and onto the driveway that led back into the woods at the North Higgins Lake State Park. The trails there wove through old and new growth in a four-mile loop that would sufficiently tire me; it was littered with hills and deserted this time of year. Just as I entered the trails, brushed with pine needles and soft earth, I felt my body begin to fade; the exhaustion that follows fight-or-flight was beginning to cut into my stamina. I faltered slightly, my cadence falling noticeably off of it rhythm, and the storm took its opening. The downpour began and caught me in its grasp.
Rain pounded down on me, stinging me through the thin cotton of my shirt, nipping at my shoulders and fingers, exposed at the end of the sleeve. My cheeks burned as the clouds dumped their spears upon me; my hair was quickly soaked and drooped into my eyes. Each breath sucked in the flavors of the forest, alive and outspread to absorb as much of the nourishing rain as it possibly could, and the taste burned my lungs even while it swirled sweetly on my tongue, nesting there and reviving memory. Water weighs eight-hundred times more than air, and I felt every thousand-pound drop crashing down on me, threatening to fracture me like an egg and spill me across the forest floor. Each opening in the canopy poured the deluge down upon my head, and after three miles, my tough exterior finally broke.
I cannot be certain if every drop of salty moisture running down my face began in the sky and absorbed salt from the sweat in my hair or if it began inside of me and was laden with sadness. I stopped, switching the stopwatch on my wrist off, and stood wearily in the middle of a puddle in the middle of a trail. It hurt. I burned. I seethed. Steam rose from me. I was alive and dying. Everything awoke and screamed at me. Squirrels in the trees, birds in the underbrush, leaves in the wind barked at me. Throbbing muscles in my legs gasped with me. My heartbeat pumped ticking me away to death. My clock counted down as though I stood in lieu of time. Lightning cracked.
There I was, in the middle of the puddle in the middle of the trail, weeping like a lost child, crouching on his haunches in the rain. I stood slowly. I looked up, out into the woods. The trees were thin and tall. The grass was too. I was small and stocky, engulfed by their enormity. All that filled my ears was the soft steaming of my breath and the constant dribbled of rain on wet leaves. I had three more miles before I could be home. It was time to let go and run to it.