It’s 10:45 PM. I’m standing on tiny patio behind my apartment, letting my dog out to pee. It’s warm. Too warm for May, but a relief from the earlier heat. It’s quiet. Sometimes I forget that the highway runs right by our house on nights I can barely hear it. I stand here, on the thin green carpet, next to a child’s unicorn-patterned folding chair and a pair of assless leather chaps left out to dry (don’t ask–my roommate is kind of a punk star).
At night, when I’m lonely, sometimes I wonder what I’m doing. What even is my life right now? I go to bed alone. I wake up alone. I miss you. Goddamn it, I miss you. I know this wasn’t my choice, not really, but I still can’t find it in me to get properly fucking angry about it.
I guess when you still love someone so much, the sad wins out.
But yeah, back to now. To the too warm night, and the jingle of Phoenix’s collar. We pass the baby gate (she still goes after the cat, no matter how many times I tell her off for it), and I give her an extra large scoop of dinner with beef sprinkles. No wonder she weighed extra at the vet. But she deserves it, even though she went ballistic at a small child through the window today. But we don’t count that. She’s so warm and soft when I go in for a kiss. Right behind her ear is still my favorite spot.
I open the fridge, dump a tablespoon of sugar in a bowl, load it up the rest of the way with strawberries. (I will quickly find that it’s hard to reach the sugar when you bury it with strawberries.) Yeah, sometimes I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with my life. But I can afford strawberries. I remember when I couldn’t afford strawberries. I had three pork chops for dinner (apparently I don’t eat enough protein), and sure, I did think about how much each one cost. But that’s more about the state of the economy than anything else.
But hey, I can eat strawberries. And yeah, I’m broke as fuck because of that expensive medication–but I choose to be on that, for a shot at feeling better in my body. I get to do that, take chances on myself. How many people get to do that? It’s probably not a life you’d be happy with, but it’s enough for me.
Yeah, I still dream about you. Dreams so sticky, they follow me around for days and get caught in my throat a week later when I’m trying to talk about them in therapy. Sometimes they never come out. But you know what else? I’m singing again. I wrote a song for the first time in years. It was a sad one, but still. I wrote it. And I sang it in front of people. And I didn’t hate it, and they didn’t either.
A few days ago was the anniversary of the day I lost you. (And I know that makes it sound like you died. You didn’t. But also, you did.) I still can’t think about that day. I can touch on it for two seconds in my mind, like a bird hovering over a branch–tap, tap–but if I try to settle, I’ll lose myself. So I don’t. I don’t think about it, I don’t talk about it. Sometimes that’s the best a person can do, just keep going, with their head down. Sometimes I feel like I’m just walking around that moment in circles, without realizing.
I spent that day at the lake. Eighty-four feet up in the air on a ledge, EDM music pumping through speakers. Too loud for me, but I didn’t complain. How could I, when I got to roll down that highline, suspended by a piece of webbing over the water, and flip upside down. Soles to the sky, hands free for half a moment. All open space and blue and me, small in the middle of it. (They had to fish me back out of the sky, ’cause apparently hauling yourself up an incline hand over hand is harder than it looks–I still have the bruises and my abs are sore as hell. But it was worth it.)
Afterward, I hiked down the route I used to take as a kid, made easier with new trails. The old ladder by the waterfall is still there, but now I take the stairs. It still felt like stepping into Jurassic Park, no matter how I got there (I finally saw that movie, by the way. There’s a whole story there. I doubt you’d want to hear it. But the movie lives up to the hype.) The ferns, and the creek, and the stone rising up all around you.
The water was just a bit too cold, still not caught up to the hot air, but I got in anyway. It took a lot to psych myself up for the full dunk, but I did it. First swim of the summer. Hung out on the paddleboard and cheered on my friends making beautiful shapes with their bodies on the aerial silks. Climbed out of the water, fingers pulling on those iron banded flakes, toes gripping at footholds. Watched the climbers pulling hard through the Coliseum cave roof. Took pictures of the guy doing gainers off the jumping rock, the big splash he made. (Yeah, I’m taking pictures again. Remember how you got me into that?)
I didn’t tell anyone what day it was. Surrounded by people, most friends, but didn’t say a thing. It’s hard to talk about my emotions now. I’m actually pretty shit at it. It feels like trying to relearn to swim as a human, all bumbling and flipperless, when in a past life I was a fish. I bet you don’t believe it–you never could get me to shut up about my feelings. But you took that ability with you. Turns out, getting it back is hard won. I’m still convincing myself it’s worth the fight.
But yeah. I’m here. I buy strawberries. I flip upside down on highlines. I swim and try acro yoga and get tangled up in silks and go to barn parties and take Phoenix to the river. I’m living a whole goddamn life here. And for the most part, I love it. But I keep moving for a reason. Because when I stand too still–there you are.
The problem with ghosts is you actually have to want them to stop haunting you.
Fuck, I didn’t want to cry tonight. I never want to cry at all. But sometimes, I’m trying so hard not to cry, that I forget to live. And I don’t want to do that anymore. I guess like anything, it takes practice. I’ll get better at it.
I ate my strawberries. They were sweet. The leftover sugar pools in a crescent moon at the bottom of my bowl, along with two leafy tops. Phoenix is curled into the pile of pillows on my floor. My room is cool enough with the fan humming. It’s time to sleep, so I can wake up again.
Goodnight.