#this post gave me more feelings
A flitting, fleeting idea that I have is Bernie expecting something from her grief over Cam. In the days after she waits, for the numbness to receed, for it to hit her. Makes it all the way to Spain and the only visceral reaction had been in those split seconds after her son had died, as that scream had torn her in half, wrenched itself from the pit of her stomach like Cam had, around 30 years ago.
She waits and expects anger. She knows the grief after losing a child. She’s seen in up close and destructive, when Elinor was taking from Serena. Whether it’s naive or shock or hope, she expects and anticipates acting in the same way. Bernie braces herself to rage against everything and everyone.
But she doesn’t. She does nothing out of the ordinary. Serena tiptoes around. Perhaps those first few weeks without Elinor are on her mind as well. The crushing weight of an absence that should never have happened.
Cam never leaves her mind, but she just can’t muster up much of anything and if she stops to think about it, to talk about it…
Bernie feels like she can BREATHE. When Cam died, horrifically, Bernie doesn’t feel that compressing ache that made Serena all twisted up and hateful. She feels like she can BREATHE. Cam was the last piece of the puzzle in setting herself free of Mogadishu. The person left to tell that had to be told. The person she couldn’t face, couldn’t live with hating her. The last thing holding her back and now…? Now there are no more secrets. No shadows or explanations or justifications to make on how she’s spent the past few years.
So Bernie breathes. Air fills her lungs. The weight leaves her shoulders. In and out. Until it’s too much. Till it leaves her so light headed that her eyes prick with tears and she can’t stop *breathing* because her son in gone and it’s awful and wrong and she shouldn’t feel like this and her head swims. Did she ever know her son? Did she allow him to know her? Is she saved? Did he save her?
And then Serena is by her side, reaching out, but she twists like wind and can’t stop breathing in and out, pushing Serena away as Serena tries to hold on. Her fingertips graze her elbow and Serena’s touch is the only tangible thing about her, the places where her fingers sweep the only part of her that feels real and solid… Bernie lets all the air in and out in sobs and whimpers now.
Bernie isn’t consumed. Bernie is weightless. And Bernie has always been one to rely on the certainty of gravity.
