Letter 2/4/2016

The heat swept in over landlocked plains and humidity crashed in waves from the South. By May it already lay thick in our hair and throats and dared us into the coming months. This summer, the sun’s nostalgia was an invitation and a warning. I had just gotten used to Winter, our Winter, and the emergence of Spring into Summer was a wicked reminder of the cyclical nature of us. 

Back when April came, the inevitable crash came with it. I felt dizzy, like gravity was lost and I was spinning in space. You were tethered below, always seemingly so secure. I pictured you laughing with friends about silly traditions and throwing your cap sarcastically, celebrating the end of an era. It was so hot that day…I wanted to wish you luck, tell you I was the one you could fall back on if the collision of your two families threatened to overshadow your achievements. I wanted to tell you I loved you. That I supported you always. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling…being so far. Every milestone, I missed. 

You knew me last in that stone house as the door at the end of the hall. I paid more in rent to have enough space to fill with skeletons of dizzy dark summer’s past without you. I thought you’d never know me there. I thought the yellow house on Hanna would memorialize me, like your corner room in Brewer did you. However, you did come to know the door at the end of the hall and the vastness of dangerous space behind it that began to feel smaller with you there. But that was December, January, February… The heat persisted like a heavy thumb on a pressure point and you caved under the weight, wanting to return to a more comfortable time. I think I was a weakness, which I both relied upon and despised. You pulled me back down from up there. I felt motion sick; I was hurt. You were hurt. 

You moved out of the apartment where we began. You opened that green door and everything that had been us, everything that hovered in the balance, was pushed out into the open sky. I had thought of that place like a museum, but now it felt like a tomb. You asked me what was wrong. I wanted to believe I could still be relevant as we erased the map of your existence there, and by extension, erased me as well. I kept smiling on. Shrugging it off. I didn’t want you to think me dramatic. You seemed entirely fine with the whole thing. All I could do was laugh at myself for becoming such a caricature. I wiped my hands clean of it, and scrubbed a little harder. I should have been more honest with you. 

I so often wanted to see what was behind that indifference without having to break you. I dreamed you would let down your walls for me, not because you had to, because you wanted to. I was scared. I hadn’t forgotten how easy you made it look to bury me when you needed to. 

July came and it was so hot the skin would peel off your bare feet if you so much as darted to your car and back. I didn’t have a car then, of course. Skeletons of my regrets still following me then. Nathan came to help me load my second-hand furniture into his truck. My clunky television set, the chipped purple dresser that was my mothers, the yellow IKEA futon, the hand-me-down mattress I had shared with you countless nights in another life so recent and so far away…I loaded up the relics I had kept enshrined in that room and said goodbye to the shadows of you I left inside. I blinked my eyes hard once, like Ezra taught me…a mental picture. 

I was heading into blank white space. There would be no rewind; repeat this time. I was relieved, actually. I saw the emptiness I felt as a new skin, a canvas I could paint myself on without the words “Lair” and “Cheat” on my chest. Words you’d said, but words I put there. There I was, surrounded by 500 square feet of something new. Every inch untouched by you. My objective: to put as much distance as I possibly could between myself and my feelings for you- and quickly, before I could be swallowed by the deafening finality of it. I shed layers of me that had become reminders of you. Ridding myself of a certain aesthetic. I got a dog. A new job. Grew out the horrible hipster mullet. I hid you away. I refused to make time to grieve. I thought that if I walked and talked and breathed something new I would learn happiness and could skip that part entirely. 

Hazy summer days went by and I busied myself with crowds of new faces. I was happy, sure, but all the while still looking-hoping- for a flash of blond and blue. Stuck between two worlds. Thinking each day is a day lost, a day closer to your departure. Thinking I’m sitting on my hands watching you walk across the Atlantic in slow motion, and I’m too cowardly to move. Thinking soon you’ll be gone and we’ll both get caught in time’s snowball effect and we won’t get this chance again. Reality will set in. This is it. This is really it. I quieted my mind by telling myself I was being strong. That I had exhausted you and you, me and it was time we lay it to sleep. I did want rest. But you can’t force rest. Constantly battling both sides. 

I opened my door to you one more time. We recited pleasantries. Christine was there. Ben too. You met Gilbert and joked that his love for you would never be challenged by anyone else and I had the quiet thought, he isn’t the only one. We hugged. I wanted a moment, but you wouldn’t give it. I should’ve known, it’s not your style. Goodbye forever, I laugh and you give me a look as if to disprove me. Not forever. For now. But I think I know better than you today. Plus, hope drives people crazy. 

The leaves awoke in flames of oranges and reds then smoldered to ashes, and you blew away with them. The weather is more comfortable come September, but I’m still getting acclimated to the change. I miss you everyday. My lungs collapse into my stomach when I catch a glimpse of that same blond and blue. I awake to dreams of you in the night and for a moment it feels like our winter is approaching again, but then I remember that the cycle is broken. That you’re gone. That I’m with someone new. Her face is quiet and soft on the pillow next to mine and I love the fact that it’s unfamiliarity still makes me happy, but I haven’t acclimated yet. 

December through to January and I push down memories of New Years with you in Asheville. The crisp mountain air, conversation around the fire pit, hands on bare skin before the house awoke that morning, the blanket of fog we passed through on the drive home…push down, lock up. Be here now. The cold creeps in between the cracks in the wood paneling of the house where I last saw you and it finds my cracks too. I use wine to warm me again. I write to you; I tell you I’m afraid I can never love like I did with you… Wanting you to agree. Wanting not to sever the tie that crossed continents for us. Hating how ugly and selfish love looks when I try to explain it. 

I tried to love after you. I was so excited at the prospect of caring about someone again, feeling any kind of affections for someone that wasn’t you, that I wore the hat. She and I both did. We were allied in our pain and both searching for a change. Great friends at first, we picked each other up, distracted each other from the fallout of our previous loves, and put space and time between us and the inevitability of facing ourselves. I became accustomed to toeing the line between the life I wanted to fit into and the one that left with you. She knew this. She had ghosts too and so, we accepted each other for them. Thus began an unconventional sort of companionship that worked reasonably well amidst it’s dysfunction. 

Winter gave way to spring, which rolled into summer, and you had been gone a year. I acquired a new taste for the loneliness I felt when thinking of you. I never enjoyed the idea of you moving on without me, but I got used to it. Bottled it. Distanced myself from the thought. After all, I was doing the same. I was trying. Walking the walk. Watching the days add up. Waiting for you to fade. 

August looming in the air and I planned to go. I planned to set forth into motion the changes I wished to see in me. I spend the days leading up to it fantasizing about steps that have not been retraced time and time again. Places and people that are not attached to memories of loss, mistakes, and regret. The utter newness and freedom of my anonymity. A career, a life, a home without you…I know you’re coming back. 

I go. She comes with me. You and I trade places and you’re back where we started. I wonder whether this is hard for you or whether I’m too egocentric. I’m somewhere foreign trying to be someone foreign, and if you were to look at my life on paper it would look just right. The distance was vast. The days kept mounting. I quit smoking and biting my nails and took up pilates and made myself meals from recipes that didn’t come from the back of a box. I read for pleasure and wrote almost everyday. I retired the apron and went to sleep before 3am. I wondered how you’d changed, if we would recognize each other. Would we feel familiar or would we feel strange? Winter blew through, a new winter much more temperate and grey than the one I’m used to, and I dissolved my relationship into something that reflected it’s real truth. I took a step away from myself and was able to recognize it’s inorganic origins. I was scared to be alone with only me. I learned a lifetime in a year. I’m still learning everyday. I’m sorry I didn’t know then what I know now. 

It has been two years since I watched you drive away and now I’m coming home. I’m coming home in two weeks because all signs point me back. It seemed fitting that I would find a future in the rubble of my past, that I would need to return to the place I was running away from. Sadly poetic and not all that surprising. Behavior can shape shift easily, but beliefs, philosophies, and feelings only evolve, and as they do they gain strength and velocity. They become more clear. It is the difference between what you do and what you think, what you present and what you withhold-even from yourself. In the end, you are at the core of me, part of my foundation. It’s hard to explain in words that capture it. You are in everything. 

I do love you even still. I believe time will never change how I feel, how I’ve always felt, about you. It will evolve, as it has already begun to, but it will never leave me. I love you. I miss talking to you. I hope you’ll say hello.