everything ends, even missing you

from the archives - circa summer '24

I think, how unfair of me, to still be holding on. There is a lot of pain left here that I don’t know how to make beautiful, don’t yet want to turn into art because that would mean you’re really gone. I don’t know how to write about anything that doesn’t have you buried underneath it all. I am worried I’ll never stop.

But the thing about closure is that you can’t force it to happen, no matter how much you will it to. I often think about what you said about lovers who have since left, deep wounds and dried blood I’ve picked new, trying to give birth to a false memory.

Time will heal most on its own, and I can’t speed it up or slow it down — this much I know. Sometimes you just have to hurt. I have spent the past month living in the most beautiful place but my mind is somewhere else. An alternate universe, a past life where we never hurt each other.

I have dragged my sadness up the street and through the door and into my home. I have taken my sadness 3,000 miles away and back — seen it use the welcome mat and take off its coat. I saw it once in the cracks of an old ceramic mug in the morning light and in my mother’s old grandfather clock that hangs in our living room. I have let it tuck me in and wake me up before dawn. This has been happening for a while now.

At the top of the Cliffs, at the end of a cigarette, at the start of the wine bottle I open before making dinner. I tried, so very hard, but at the end of every distraction was you. Us. The memories we never made and the few that I immortalized in drunk poetry recitations. On paper, we are infinite— fifth dimensional.

I’m laughing because I’m halfway across the world and I can’t get over something that I saw coming from miles away. I’m on a pier in a different continent and crying over what was inevitable. I live in a town where there are more cows than people and the bartender from the one pub knows my name and I still can’t escape the fact that I am exactly the kind of person this would happen to. The kind of person who has been irrevocably changed by your leaving.

Life offers us these glimpses of what our future could look like, but they’re just that— brief and uncertain. What do you do when you get so close to what you want, you end up on the other side of it? Hey, what’s a good return address on all this love left over? Can I still get a kiss for the road?

After eliminating all which is impossible— I hate you, you’re a bad person, I didn’t know this was going to end— I’m left with all the improbable truths. Like I am angry at you and I miss you and I know this is for the best. I deserve better and maybe even you do too, but I don’t want to hear about your days anymore. I knew this would never last, and still I went raging against the dying of the light. It is not wrong to want to be loved. There’s bravery in trying.

I used to wish that you would come to regret it all faster so I can say that love never reached me, at least not when the weather was right. It’s December now. I wrap my scarf tight, and think, you just missed me on your way out.