I wonder if she even remembers. I spent a lot of time thinking about this day. How I would feel when the arthritis ridden clock would drag 10-13-17 into my life. Like a screaming child trying to avoid the dentist, this day grabbed me by the collar and made me walk right into it. My tantrum did not make a difference. I could not fake Ill or feign a flat tire to avoid it. No matter how hard I wanted to fight it, the day came. Just as it promised it would, like the mailman between 1pm to 3pm. Like the cable guy between 8am and noon. The day came, nestled right between Thursday the 12th and Saturday the 14th. It came, like it promised it would.
It didn't learn that from you.
And the truth is. I didn't just brush it off. We all know I am never one to avoid a hard conversation, a hard trail, or a hard person. Hard is just a word we use when we have run out of excuses to make for ourselves. When we want something but don't want to do the work for it.
The truth is. I thought about everything I knew I would on this day. The day would shift through relieved, sad, happy and angry like rush hour traffic in New York. Coming. Going. Staying put. Yelling at random people. Tailgating. The songs of Unnecessary horns would be singing for no good reason other then I was just fucking frustrated.
I wondered. I wondered a lot about the happy. About how the pizza would have tasted on that cool fall day? (You were such a good dough thrower). I wondered if Ed Sheeran would have still been our song, and if in fact you would have lumiered over me had you stayed, darling? I wondered how many times I would have almost dropped a banana pepper on my navy vest? How many times you would have laughed at me for doing so. How many twirls we ended up practicing in the kitchen for our dance? How many bags of pepperoni we would have used to feed Frank just for one good wedding photo? Would I see the old books as centerpieces and wonder how many more we could have read together had you not left? Would I have cried during our first look? (Probably, but you would have cried first Tay-you usually did and I loved that about you).
Hours before a wedding. Most (lesbian) brides would be drinking mimosas, reading letters exchanged between each other (I had already written yours and edited it 22 times), pressing their bow ties, shining their chucks, or shoving the usual wedding jitters back down their throat like a jack in the box. The excitement just waiting to explode.
That would be the norm for most brides, who weren't engaged to a ghost.
Instead of writing vows about my pledge to you, I write a blog about how I learned so much more about you in the way that you left. In the way that you burned your promises to keep your new lovers warm. I learned how to keep myself warm in a graveyard of your broken promises and it was cold there. So fucking cold.
And while I wondered all of those sweet sweet things, I also wondered the bad. Like how many more girls will it take for you to figure out that what you are searching for you once had? You held it. Let it slip away in a game of tug of war with yourself. Because you are so used to coming and going. And hiding. It's what you've done your whole life. New faces. Lovers. Places. I wonder if by now I would have enough logs of your lies to keep me warm all winter long? Or How many excuses and "saying things just to say them" I would have collected in my pocket---like a Pez collection. Would I have a lot to show off? Would I be rich off my collections? Or How many more times you forgot to stand up to your friends or family and do and be who you wanted? The you, you promised you wanted to be in your most vulnerable moments. If you found forever in the dictionary yet? Or if you started your own construction company yet to build all the dream homes you keep promising to every pretty little face that walks your way? I wondered If your past is still a graveyard of bones that will ever be honestly dug up by you and shared? Or is it still sitting there? Right where you left it. Right where you leave everything before it "gets to hard".
See. We are different. I haven't replaced feelings and fear with rationalization and things, or new faces. I'm not doing the same thing again. I didn't leave a shell of you. I didn't push my feelings down. My pain. My hurt. I didn't remain a spectator of the mess you made. I stayed on the dance floor in the heart of it all and I cried. I cried everyday since you've been gone. Sometimes in tears, and sometimes by just looking at your empty coffee cup in the cupboard. So lonely.
I grieved who I thought you were for a year. I still have bad days. Days where I write your name in chocolate syrup on my ice cream and and then smash it with my spoon. Seems silly I know. But it's so similarly reminding of you----cold, and gone before you know it if you aren't careful.
I spent months desperately searching for answers. I felt like I was grieving
for someone but didn’t have the body.
I searched for you everywhere. In hospitals. In movie theaters. In donut shops. In half eaten leftovers. In songs. I left your pictures hanging on the wall. Your to do list still waiting to be checked off on the kitchen dry erase window.
I practiced giving your eulogy in my head. It gets shorter and shorter with each day that goes by.
I grieved for me too.
See, Sometimes when you are broken so badly you don't ever get back to being the same. While I'll never be who I was, I shall return differently. Perhaps in a different form. Like a pallet becomes a bench to hold someone up, or old tshirts become a comfortable quilt to stay warm in. I too will become, the same way these things turn from old memories to new.
I don't know know that I'll ever be the same. But I guess I'll be something different. And these days different seems better then being just like you.
Tay, Sometimes I call you Amelia. You knew exactly where you wanted to go, but you just couldn't get there. Sometimes, I wonder where the girl I knew went? Why she didn't send a smoke signal when she got lost? And I feel sad that she doesn't know her way back home. Did you have to circle the world to know that the best thing you'd ever discover was already in front of you?
Sometimes I think you were broken long before I found you. You were a tire, always running somewhere. Never really aligned right within yourself. Never knowing your final destination.
I hope when you get broken again like I did. Like you did to me...I hope you return to something prettier, like the girl I once knew.
I hope you are a tire that becomes a decorative home for a family of petunias. You deserve to be beautiful again someday.
And when you break--- like you broke me...
Don't waste your time looking for the body.
You'll never find me.
