Losing Noah - Erin T. Sim

I was forty-one when Noah stayed behind in an Amarillo motel, and I drove on in a mad rush to Kansas, to see my heart’s addiction, a man named Mike who preferred to be called Kawyotee.

We’d been together since I was eighteen, Noah and I, and the story of how I didn’t fight to get him back haunts me to this day, some thirty years later. There was no finer companion, no one better at soothing me when I was sad or lonely, no one better at listening to me talk through the death of each parent.  No one better to snuggle with.  We always traveled together. All my friends knew and liked him.  And then, that one night: a night that was too short because the motel had been a longer drive from California  than I’d planned, and I hustled out of bed early for the dash to Kansas. I am ashamed to say that I didn’t even notice Noah wasn’t there until I arrived at the trailer park where Kawyotee was living with friends.

A short story by Jonis Agee, “Mercury,” slowly peels away the tale of a man who loved his 19__ Mercury  with his whole being. When it no longer ran, he parked it in his back yard and would sit in it, just listening to the radio. One day he noticed that part of the word “Mercury” was gone.  Then, bit by bit, the entire car disappears, possibly at the hands of local vandals… but maybe not. Maybe it’s simply the entropy that we all fight against.  And he suffers each loss, really suffers,  and does absolutely nothing about any of it.  That’s my recollection, anyway, of a story that hit me in the gut when I read it on the bus home from my downtown job a year or two after Noah and I went our separate ways. Agee’s character and I shared the inability to save something precious to us.  For years,  I beat myself up about my failure to act.

I could have called the motel in Amarillo to ask if Noah was there.  I didn’t.  I didn’t do it.

Was it a sign that I should learn to live like a grown-up, independent woman?  It didn’t work. I tried replacing  Noah with Elizabeth. Then Bosco and Lily, Owen and Emmet. With Robért and Bradley,  Flora and Bruno. With Alton and Seamus, Ezra and Anna,  and two dozen others until there was no more room in my bed or on any shelf for one more bear. And I kept adopting them even though not one of them filled that empty place left by my old friend.  Not one of them was a little solid foam bear with open arms and black button eyes and a stitched nose and no mouth at all. No mouth at all allowed him to have every emotion I wanted him to have.

Kawyotee had a huge heart, but he wasn’t in the market for a woman who wanted soothing and cuddling. He didn’t much focus on loss or grief in his own life,  and he preferred to assure me that some child who passed through the Amarillo motel took up with Noah and that they had a wonderful life. Without me.

Tim, who entered the picture within a year or two, was consumed with his own losses. Acquiring and gifting bears became a form of communication between us. He had his own favorites:  his well-worn Teddy, and Burleigh, Alton and the twins, Axel and Alex.  Our cuddlesome little family didn’t fill the void for either of us.  It just helped fill the bed and the shelves and tabletops.  Tim never fully grasped that it wasn’t simply a loss that I grieved.  It was the not-knowing of why I did not act to change the story.  

Kawyotee walked on in December 2021, and Tim dropped his body in June, in a Care Center, with Teddy in his arms. I am left behind with personalities and names and stories and photos of our travels. Although Teddy keeps me company now,  I still do not have Noah. I do not have knowledge of his path after we parted that early morning in Amarillo.  It was me who dropped his body.  And I have to walk on. Without any of them.

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Erin Sim