The Bottom of Everything

Maggie's old iphone sat on the nightstand for three months after the funeral. I couldn't bring myself to touch it, couldn't face the digital ghost haunting its black screen. But tonight, with bourbon burning my throat and silence pressing against the walls of our apartment, I finally plugged it in.

The screen flickered to life. 47 unread messages. All from me.

"Pick up some milk on your way home?"

"Game starts at 7."

"I love you."

The last message was sent the morning she died. The morning she'd left for work and never came back. Some drunk driver—twenty years old, texting behind the wheel—had T-boned her car at 50th and Grand. Just like that. No warning. No goodbye.

I scrolled through her photos. There we were at Wrigley Field last summer, both of us wearing Cubs caps, grinning like idiots after finally catching a foul ball. She'd kept that baseball on her dresser like it was holy.

There were other photos too. The one of her father—old, cancer-ridden, bear of a man even in hospice—holding her hand. The camping trip where we'd seen that grizzly in the distance and she'd grabbed my arm, terrified and thrilled. Her face when I told her I loved her for the first time, flushed and beautiful and unsure.

After she died, I'd moved through the world like a zombie. Going to work, coming home, eating, sleeping, existing but not living. My coworkers had stopped asking how I was doing. My friends had stopped inviting me out. What was there to say to a man whose heart had been hollowed out?

I opened her notes app. There was a draft she'd never sent:

"If something happens to me, I want you to be happy. Really happy. Not that fake happiness where you smile and pretend everything's fine. Find someone. Take that trip to Japan we always talked about. For god's sake, finally fix the gutters on the garage. Don't become one of those people who lives in the past."

Tears came hot and fast. She'd known me too well. Known that I'd wrap myself in grief like a security blanket, let it define me, let it become my identity. Known that I'd choose suffering over moving forward because suffering felt like loving her.

Outside, I could hear the neighborhood kids playing baseball in the park. The crack of a bat, someone yelling "Safe!" The ordinary sounds of ordinary people living their ordinary lives. Maggie would have wanted to be out there. Would have wanted me to be out there.

I deleted the unread messages. All 47 of them.

Then I picked up the phone and dialed my sister. It had been months. "Hey," I said when she answered. "You busy? I was thinking maybe I could come over for dinner. If that's okay."

Her surprise was evident even through the phone. "Tonight? Yes, of course. Are you... are you sure?"

"Yeah," I said. "I think I am."

I hung up and looked at the phone one last time. Then I put it in the drawer—the same drawer where I kept that foul ball from Wrigley, where I kept the ring I'd never given her because I'd been waiting for the perfect moment.

Some moments you have to make. Some things you have to let go of. Some games, you just have to keep playing.