Part deux: Letters we tuck into drawers and never send; a universal letter to lovers.
I wrote this during the time period when I wasn’t speaking to the boyfriend this summer. I hadn’t wanted to talk for a few days but there was miscommunication and we didn’t talk for almost six weeks. The day I finally felt like my heart couldn’t take anymore sadness and I felt so, so depressed, I wrote the following:
Most days, I don’t think of you. I go through the day unaware of your existence in the universe, filling the familiar aches with books and new records and jogs and new faces. My brain is smart and tries to fool me for a while. For a minute, it almost seems as if you never happened at all until the tiniest thing sets me off. Memory is a cruel thing and sharpest when it needs not be. I check my voicemail and hear a saved message from you, one of you imitating Tom Waits to make me laugh when I checked it after class or work, and I feel my throat close up. Tears fill my eyes and I realize that this will be the last voicemail I ever receive from you; this one doesn’t even have an i love you in it, it’s just pure Tom Waits impersonation. I end the call and rub my eyes.
I go about my day and put in my headphones as I shop. Shuffle plays me a song that you put on a mix for me and it all begins again. I cry in Target in between the hair care products and the moisturizer and I realize that nothing is over, that my heart, my habits have not caught up with my ever-wise brain. I’m never alone now except when I’m about to fall asleep and I hope each night that I’m so exhausted that I just crash in to my sheets and black out, a pile of tired bone and sinew. I want to shut off my functions so the thoughts in my head don’t reach the rest of my body. I don’t sleep, I’m unconscious for a few hours a night.
There is something about the absence of someone after a breakup or the end of a romantic entanglement that is felt so deeply, I don’t understand it. Even in long distance relationships, the constant comfort of having someone so near to you emotionally leaves a hole inside you. There is a heartwrenching listless feeling that comes and you wander through the day, half of a person. I feel like every time I love someone I give them a part of myself and when things end, I hobble around for a while, missing limbs or an eye, a victim in the the long war we call love. The only comfort is that eventually the parts of themselves they gave to me grow over my wounds and I become a patchwork quilt of my past loves. We’re never truly individuals as we are a product of the love and people that shape us. It’s the only thought that makes me feel better as I try to forget. I’m trying to forget for now so that soon I can remember and be happy for the love of ours that was.
You are weaved into the fibers of my soul in a way that I cannot describe and I love you still for every breath you take, even if those breaths are no longer for me.
As it turns out, he was still reading my tumblr, and he saw it and commented the following:
I saw this late on a Thursday night and I felt so many things. I was pissed off and sad and confused, and so I drank myself into a whiskey-soaked stupor and listened to the saddest music possible and went to bed. The next morning I woke up with a splitting headache and emailed him some lines from an Anne Sexton poem that felt appropriate to us (And I don’t know, don’t know, if we belong together or apart, except that my soul lingers over the skin of you and I wonder if I’m ruining all we had, and had not) and after some difficult conversations, we found that, you know, it was still there and wanted to do this for real. I was ready to do this being an adult in a relationship thing for real and here we are.
It took me a long time to break down my walls, I had been building them for years and by the time Gabe came around, they were way above my head and I could barely make out things that were trying to get in. I’ve been vulnerable now with him, most importantly with him, but just in general in my life now. I’m letting things and people in and it seems that the more I let in, the more I get. There is always the chance that anything in my life could go terribly awry and fall apart but what’s the point of not even trying? I’d rather feel the cool wind against my skin as I leap off the precipice than to stand back and watch everyone else jump and live without me. Living is good, feeling is good. Love has become a constant part of my life rather than an idealized concept in my mind as I learn to let it all in and just be.
