Lareign Ward’s work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Mary Sue, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. She’s a Texas native who currently lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Ward's nonfiction, “Two Boyfriends,” was originally published in The Southeast Review Volume 35.2 .
Two Boyfriends
I have both a live boyfriend and a dead boyfriend.
I don’t see much of either one these days.
The live one lives two-and-a-half hours away, including a ferry ride. The dead one lived and died three miles away, in a white wood-frame house on a street named after an Ivy League school. I pass that street all the time on my way to the north side of town, but I’ve never let myself make that right turn. Not since I heard the news.
I talk to the live one all the time via text and occasionally phone, although he’s almost completely deaf in his left ear, which makes the latter difficult.
I talked to the dead one via text until he stopped talking to me, and I was sure he was sick of me. Three months later, I found out he had actually just been sick of being alive.
So then I started talking to him like he lived in the insulation, like he had died and gotten stuck in my attic on the way to the afterlife. I yelled at him, and cried, and yelled some more.
He never answered, of course. So I started talking to him more quietly, in my head, like when I walked down the streets of Seattle that sunny day in late February, the landscape bright and loud, and it seemed for the first time that two ideas could coexist in my head: sadness that he died, and happiness that I hadn’t died with him.
I met both boyfriends online, on the same Internet dating site. They both messaged me first, albeit a little over a year apart. The live one simply said, “Hello.” The dead one noted that the party favor I held in my profile photo, the one of me on New Year’s Eve in some distant state, at first looked to him like “some big-ass gas station cigar.”
To the live one, I replied, “Hello. Is it me you’re looking for?” To the dead one, I said, “Everything is bigger in Texas, but the cigars aren’t that big.”
In each case, I added a smiley face.
Last winter, the live one was supposed to see me over Valentine’s Day weekend, or at least on Presidents Day, but he had just started working again, and it turned out that the check that was supposed to get mailed the week before wouldn’t actually get mailed until Tuesday. And I didn’t have any money at that moment, either, so I waited.
The dead one, I waited for and waited for, convinced it wasn’t over for us, that we still had things to learn from each other. Then I learned he was gone. Just enough time had passed that I could only find his obituary online, not in the big stack of recent newspapers the library kept on file. I wanted a way to hold his absence in my hands and feel it as something tangible, but that too eluded me. There hadn’t been a note. Not for his child, not for his siblings, not for anyone.
They both have wives, technically. The live one filed for divorce more than two years ago, after his wife cheated on him repeatedly, but custody issues have dragged things out. He recently found a combination wedding registry and baby registry for her. He is not sure if she is actually pregnant or just planning ahead. There is plenty of drama in their shared past, and even though they’re split up now, there’s the potential for plenty more in the future.
The dead one’s wife left him a few months before we met, leading him to his last unsuccessful suicide attempt, the one he told me about when we went camping. After he shared it, I said, “I’m glad you’re still around.” He smiled, a smile that grows more distant to me every time I recall it.
Not long after he shared that story, I asked him about filing for divorce. In a non-committal voice, he said they both wanted to file at the same time, adding, “Divorce isn’t cheap you know.”
They both work or worked with computers.
I’ve told them both I love them. With the live boyfriend, I said it with my eyes closed, in a whisper, but he heard me all the same, and he said it back.
With the dead boyfriend, I didn’t say it until he was long past the point where he could hear me, much less respond.
The live one tells me he wants to be honest about everything. He sends me filings in his divorce, attachments that sit unread in my inbox because I am already scared by how invested I’ve become in this.
The dead one went silent one day in the car when I tried to apologize for something, then told me, “I guess I don’t want to talk about it.” Perhaps in his mind, none of it mattered anymore, because it was already over, or close enough.
With the live one, he tells me he cares, and I’m scared to believe him. I’m scared to become a woman who knows she is loved like tha