Rummaging for some phosphate buffer a couple of months back, I rotated my rack of tubes. I must not have done that in a long time, because I wasn't expecting it when your name came into view.
I used to love encountering all the laboratory ephemera that reminded me this used to be your bench -- the apparently bottomless bottle of gel-loading buffer with your initials scrawled across it; your color-coded labels (red tape for use with gloves, blue for bare fingers) that still, four years after your departure, cling to many of my pens and pencils; the sombrero-clad, trial-sized Bacardi bottle a labmate brought you as a souvenir from Puerto Rico, which I've miraculously neither consumed nor evicted from my overcrowded top shelf... It was all a comfortable legacy of your presence.
Now (still, a year later) my gut lurches every time I accidentally stumble across evidence of you.
I've learned to navigate around some of it. The few things you passed on to me when you decamped for LA, I shuffled away into a little-used drawer at home -- nearby if I need to look at them, but otherwise unable to crop up and upset me at inopportune moments. Old e-mails we exchanged, and subsequent messages about your death: all printed out, backed up, and purged from my hard drive, mercifully out of sight. I'm in a different apartment nowadays, across town, where the absence of memories makes life more manageable.
Of course all sorts of random shit still calls you to mind, but at least the more agonizing relics no longer ambush me on a day-to-day basis.
The lab can be hard, though. For all that I’ve invented little strategies -- habitually detouring around the alumni wall where your photo is pinned, orienting that rack of tubes so your name safely faces the wall again -- it's impossible to stage-manage absolutely where and when you'll manifest. It happens less often now, but I never know when I'll unwittingly come across an old vector diagram in your handwriting, or flip over an index namecard to find "Sky" scribbled on the back next to a stupid frog sticker. I'll have a sick shock of recognition that I'm holding something you made, something you touched, and that flash of connection makes your fundamental absence seem all the more profound. At which point there's nothing left to do but slip out for a little while, cry as inaudibly and briefly as possible in the corner bathroom stall, march back, and grimly reinitiate whatever task I just fucked up by leaving. (It's a stupid game, and I can't quite fathom why I play it, but bonus points are awarded for smiling like nothing's wrong.)
Some days I just want to divest completely, throw it all out and be grateful there was never more of your now-emotionally-laden material crap strewn across my daily landscape. Other days, I still struggle against the urge to hoard every last stupid scrap, anxious over how little tangible evidence of your presence is left to me. There's still something about all those physical vestiges of your life that ties me in knots... maybe because, for all that it's convenient to address this in the second person, I've never been able to convince myself of an afterlife, and have little faith there's anything left of you but memories and these cheap, unbearable, irreplaceable souvenirs.
There are moments when the absurdity of it amuses me: in your absence, I am conducting intensely fraught emotional relationships with a green plastic rack and 50 jauntily straw-hatted milliliters of bad rum.
The rest of the time, encountering these flotsam traces of your life just sucks. To a surreal extent. It seems amazing that it's been sucking for a full year already... less overwhelmingly now than at first, at least. I guess that's something.
I miss you.
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