The Longest Ride

is to close my eyes and fade away.

But Ruth will not let me. There is an intensity in her gaze that wills me to look at her.

“It is worse now,” she says. “The way you are feeling.”

“I’m just tired,” I mumble.

“Yes,” she says. “But it is not your time yet. There is more you must tell me.”

I can barely make out her words. “Why?”

“Because it is the story of us,” she says. “And I want to hear about you.”

My mind spins again. The side of my face hurts where it presses against the steering wheel, and I notice that my broken arm looks bizarrely swollen. It has turned purple and my fingers look like sausages. “You know how it ends.”

“I want to hear it. In your own words.”

“No,” I say.

“After sitting shiva, the depression set in,” she goes on, ignoring me. “You were very lonely. I did not want this for you.”

Sorrow has crept into her voice, and I close my eyes. “I couldn’t help it,” I say. “I missed you.”

She is silent for a moment. She knows I am being evasive. “Look at me, Ira. I want to see your eyes as you tell me what happened.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Why not?” she persists.

The ragged sound of my breath fills the car as I choose my words. “Because,” I finally offer, “I’m ashamed.”

“Because of what you did,” she announces.

She knows the truth and I nod, afraid of what she thinks of me. In time, I hear her sigh.

“I was very worried about you,” she finally says. “You would not eat after you sat shiva, after everyone went away.”

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“This is not true. You were hungry all the time. You chose to ignore it. You were starving yourself.”

“It doesn’t matter now —,” I falter.

“I want you to tell me the truth,” she persists.

“I wanted to be with you.”

“But what does that mean?”

Too tired to argue, I finally open my eyes. “It means,” I say, “that I was trying to die.”
     

     
    It was the silence that did it. The silence that I still experience now, a silence that descended after the other mourners went away. At the time, I was not used to it. It was oppressive, suffocating – so quiet that it eventually became a roar that drowned out everything else. And slowly but surely, it leached me of my ability to care.

Exhaustion and habits further conspired against me. At breakfast, I would pull out two cups for coffee instead of one, and my throat would clench as I put the extra cup back in the cupboard. In the afternoon, I would call out that I was going out to retrieve the mail, only to realize that there was no one to answer me. My stomach felt permanently tense, and in the evenings, I couldn’t fathom the idea of cooking a dinner that I would have to eat alone. Days would pass where I ate nothing at all.

I am no doctor. I do not know if the depression was clinical or simply a normal product of mourning, but the effect was the same. I did not see any reason to go on. I did not want to go on. But I was a coward, unwilling to take specific action. Instead, I took no action, other than a refusal to eat much of anything, and again the effect was the same. I lost weight and grew steadily weaker, my path preordained, and little by little, my memories became jumbled. The realization that I was losing Ruth again made everything even worse, and soon I was eating nothing at all. Soon, the summers we spent together vanished entirely and I no longer saw any reason to fend off the inevitable. I began to spend most of my time in bed, eyes unfocused as I gazed at the ceiling, the past and the future a blank.
     

     
    “I do not think this is true,” she says. “You say that because you were depressed, you did not eat. You say that because you could not remember, you did not eat. But I think that it is because you did not eat that you could not remember. And so you did not have the strength to fight the depression.”

“I was old,” I say. “My strength had long since evaporated.”

“You are making excuses now.” She waves a hand. “But this is not a time to make jokes. I was very worried about you.”

“You couldn’t be worried. You weren’t there. That was the problem.”

Her eyes narrow and I know I’ve struck a nerve. She tilts her head, the morning sunlight casting half her face in shadow. “Why do you say this?”

“Because it’s true?”

“Then how can I be here now?”

“Maybe you aren’t.”

“Ira…” She shakes her