If I Could Tell You Read Online Free PDF Page A

you can do without thinking. Push the door open, walk out. You can walk for a long time without bothering about which way to go. Breathe, become real for the first time in your life. It was like that, the night I left the place, the house I lived in for twenty-two years. Home. I left with my work bag slung over my shoulders. Just a few things, tees, a pair of jeans. Before leaving, I took out my bible from the top drawer, gilt-edged, leather-bound, my name embossed in cursive script on the edge of the cover. I laid it on the bed, just for my mother. Then I walked away, touching my newly shorn hair. Feeling that I could breathe now. Let go. Dress however I wanted. Talk and walk and move however I wanted. It felt exactly right, walking down the street. Clomping, my mother would have said, with big strides, arms swinging. It felt right even though I had no idea where I was going to sleep that night. I could live how I wanted. Funny though, how that took a while, getting comfortable in my new skin, getting rid of the old. Little details, like how to sit to make sure no one catches the ridiculous hands-on-knees thing sneaking out of me — the habit my mother trained me into adopting since I was four — sneaking out of my limbs, letting me down.
    That’s what she said. My mother. I let her down. She also said a ton of other things, hissed them at me when she got the chance to. Spat the words into my face, enunciating them perfectly in the way that she has; she could be asking for a pot of Earl Grey at Sunday brunch. She said things like that to me all the time, during a break in the nine o’clock news, while pruning the bonsai on a Sunday afternoon, or during a cousin’s wedding dinner. Things that my dad and brother shut out, pretended not to hear. She said, you’re a disgrace, I am ashamed to have you as a child. If I tried, I would be able to recall more of these gems. I used to do that. Lie in bed, thinking of all the things she said to me and coming up with witty comebacks that I never would have uttered, even if I had thought of them right then and there. It doesn’t matter now. I let her down, she said. That last time, I replied. I told her I was tired of doing that. For a second her face softened but then she narrowed her eyes. You’re tired, what about me? she said. An hour later, I was gone.
    Gone. For all she knows, I could be gone like the drinks guy. I yelled at him without thinking, then drank my coffee, much too fast, swallowed it, feeling it burn the inside of my mouth, being grateful for that so I could focus on the pain and not think about what he might have seen. Not that it matters now. He can’t tell anyone. Whatever thought he had about me, it is gone like him. All of it, his thoughts, gone. I wonder if he had been planning it already. If it had been in his head while he was bringing us the drinks. If I had looked hard enough, maybe I could have seen it in the stare — seen that it wasn’t about me at all. Bloody arrogant fuck. Everything is not about you. He could have been thinking, there, that’s what I’ll do tomorrow. Leap off the top of the building.
    And I could have done. Nothing. Nothing, really.
    When I saw him the next day, spread out on the floor like that, I thought it was a joke. Or that he had passed out from too much alcohol, like Sam did one New Year’s Eve. I saw from where we were, from our window, six floors up, a dark red pool quickly gathering on the ground below his head. Even from high up I could see. It was then, with the life coming out of him, that I thought of him as a person. Someone who had been breathing, talking, living through each hour of his life just as I did. Strange how I only thought it when he was dead or dying. I only thought it when he was no longer there. It’s like when something happens with a person and you find out that they’re real, real in a way that makes them step out of the box you put them in. Sometimes they go back in there, as if that