I shook my head.
“They found his body.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
She sighed heavily. “Poor guy, used to hang out around here all the time.”
“Who?”
“Buckley.”
I put my hand over my heart. “Jeff Buckley?”
“The very same. Handsome kid. So talented, gone too soon.”
Her eyes crinkled as she shook her head mournfully.
“What happened?” I could barely speak.
She stopped cleaning and stared out the window in a daze. Her voice was low and wobbly, like she was on the verge of tears. “Drowned in the Mississippi with his damn boots on. He’d been missing, and they just found his body on the shore. Used to see him walk by here all the time.”
I melted into sobs, feeling such sadness for someone I didn’t even know but had felt intensely connected to for so long. It was the first time I really thought about how fleeting it all is. Was this life? I wondered. You can spend hours upon hours engaged in meaningless, arbitrary bullshit, and then die while taking a dip in the river, your bloated body washing up onshore like discarded trash, only to be buried and forgotten?
The first time someone young and vibrant dies—someone you look up to, someone you relate to—it blows you back, right off your feet. Oh, fuck, we’re all gonna die, nobody knows when, nobody knows how, you think. And in that moment, you realize how little control you have over your own destiny. From the time you’re born, you have no control; you can’t choose your parents, and, unless you’re suicidal, you can’t choose your death. The only thing you can do is choose the person you love, be kind to others, and make your brutally short stint on earth as pleasant as possible.
I left the café in a blur of tears, too sick to finish my coffee. The waitress wouldn’t let me pay, probably because she didn’t realize how much the news would affect me. “It’s on me, hon.” I nodded gratefully and ran all the way back to Senior House. When I saw Matt standing outside of the building, I slammed right into his chest and dissolved.
“Grace, what is it?”
I rubbed my tears and snot all over his shirt and broke the news through sobs. “Jeff . . . Buckley’s . . . dead.”
“Oh baby, it’s okay.” He rubbed my back and swayed with me. “Shh, don’t worry, we can get you another fish.”
I pulled away and looked up at him. “No. The real Jeff Buckley.”
His face turned ashen. “Oh shit. How?”
“Drowned a few days ago. They found his body today.”
“That’s terrible.” He held me to his chest, and I could hear his heart beating fast.
“I know, I can’t believe it,” I said through tears.
But the truth was, I wasn’t sad for Jeff Buckley as much as I was sad for Matt and for me. For us. For the short time we had left together.
If I asked, would you stay?
He knew my thoughts somehow. He bent and kissed me once on each cheek, then my forehead, then my chin, then my lips. “I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you, too,” I said through my tears.
“Grace, will you do something with me?”
“Anything.” Ask me to go with you. Tell me you’ll stay. Tell me you’ll marry me. For real this time.
“Let’s go right now and get tattoos.”
“Okay,” I said, a little stunned. Not exactly what I was expecting, but I would do anything he asked in that moment.
We each got three words in wispy script. Mine went across the back of my neck, just at the base, and Matt’s went across his chest, right over his heart. We each chose the words for the other, writing them down on a piece of paper and handing them to the two tattoo artists. We didn’t know what they would be until the ink was pierced into our skin. I was like our version of a blood oath.
While we were getting tattooed, we stole glances at each other and smiled. I wondered what he was thinking. All the times he told me that he cared for me still wasn’t enough. It was never enough when I knew he was leaving the next day.
My tattoo was done first, and I used a mirror to read what Matt had chosen. The type was small and looked cute and feminine, and I loved it before I even read it. I looked closely and saw the words: Green-eyed lovebird.
“It’s perfect!” I squealed. Matt watched me, smiling happily, trying not to look down at his own tattoo.
When his was done, he stared into a handheld mirror with curious eyes. “ ‘just the ash.’ Is this Leonard Cohen?”
“Yep. You know it?”
“What’s the whole quote again?”
I swallowed hard and tried not to cry, but my entire body was betraying me. The tattoo artists walked away and gave us a moment. Matt stood from the chair and wrapped his arms around me carefully, tucking me against his chest on the opposite side of his bandaged tattoo.
“ ‘Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.’ ”
He buried his face in my hair. “My life is burning well.”
Yes, but for how long?
Even though it was still healing, I must have kissed the words over his chest a hundred times that night. He’d kiss the back of my neck and tell me how much he was going to miss his green-eyed lovebird, and then I would call him a cheese ball and we would laugh and then I would cry.
The next morning, Tati left to borrow her dad’s Chrysler to take Matt to the airport. Meanwhile, Matt rushed around trying to pack everything that he wasn’t taking with him so he could ship it back to L.A.