Tracie Adams
I didn’t go to the funeral because he meant nothing to me. That’s what I told myself. He was just a boy with a white work van with ladders strapped to the roof. Just a seventeen-year-old with a long ponytail and an eight-track jammed with the Rolling Stones. We tumbled in the back among power tools and sheetrock dust, our spines pressed against cold metal, our breath thick with hunger. It was skin and heat, not love. Two bodies using friction to forget what came before. If it meant nothing, then there was nothing to mourn.
I didn’t go to the funeral because I didn’t want to intrude on his wonderful family. The six-o’clock news showed a grieving mother, a sister, friends with pinched faces and red eyes. I had never met them. I learned his middle name from the obituary. I imagined myself slipping into a pew, a stranger among the legitimate mourners, carrying an ugly secret. My parents didn’t even know he existed. On Friday nights I shouted, “Going to Sherry’s!” into my father’s study and disappeared as the pipe smoke followed me out the door. I had no rightful place beside that casket. I was the faceless girl in the van.
I didn’t go to the funeral because it wouldn’t have changed anything. He was already gone—a mangled corpse catapulted through splintered glass and twisted metal into a ditch. No hymn or handshake could alter the blunt fact of it. What haunted me wasn’t the crash but the quiet on our drives home, the way the tape would end, and we would sit in the afterheat, windows fogged, saying nothing. We had tried to cauterize our separate childhood wounds with skin and sweat—his stories of a raging father half-told, my own sexual abuse and eating disorder never spoken at all. In the van, with “Beast of Burden” blaring, we tried to numb ourselves and feel something better at the same time. A funeral could not resurrect what we never knew how to name.
I didn’t go to the funeral because I had my own ways to celebrate our love. If that’s what it was. I had rituals. I traced my finger over the newspaper clipping—the grainy photo the only proof that he was ever real. I remembered the night he strutted in the back of the van, hammer in hand, singing into it like a microphone, hips swinging, ponytail whipping as he mimicked Jagger’s swagger until I laughed so hard I forgot where I was. For a moment we were just kids performing for each other, not escaping anything. In the sanctuary of my room, I listened to that tape on my stereo, singing along and silently promising to be his beast of burden, to carry the heavy load of our shared secrets the rest of the way.
I didn’t go to the funeral because what I took for love was only survival. We were not star-crossed lovers. We were teenagers trying to outrun our histories by colliding with each other in the dark. The grind of metal against our backs, sharp edges of tools pressing into skin, pleasure blurring into shame. None of it was romance. It was guerilla warfare, strategy, anesthesia. I cried for months in the privacy of my closet, telling myself I had almost loved a boy and then he died. As if missing the funeral was the tragedy. As if being wanted was the same as being cherished. As if the real tragedy was what we had lost, when it was always about what we never had, and how long it took me to understand the difference.
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Tracie Adams, a retired educator and playwright, writes flash fiction and memoir from her farm in rural Virginia. She is the author of two essay collections, Our Lives in Pieces and Not Finished Yet. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, longlisted at Wigleaf Top 50, and published widely in literary magazines including Cleaver, Dishsoap Quarterly, SoFloPoJo, Fictive Dream, and more. Find her at tracieadamswrites.com and follow her on X @1funnyfarmAdams and BlueSky @tracieadams.