"He only wants one thing."
I knew he was right but I didn't care. I needed something, anything to put space between my past and the present. When you lose yourself, it's not that you forget who you used to be, it's that who you used to be is gone. All I wanted was to forget her; not to be constantly reminded of that girl walking around the corners of my mind.
Just before last call, Michael and I started dancing with a beautiful middle-aged woman at the bar. I recognized her. Like me, she spent every night there. She danced closer to Michael with an elegance I had never seen within those four walls before.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," she said back.
She put her hands against his chest, patted his broad shoulders.
"You look just like my son did."
"Oh, yeah?" Michael asked.
"Just like he did before he killed himself."
The sound was sucked out of the room.
"Oh my God, I'm so sorry," we both said immediately, not knowing quite what to do. The pain was etched deeply in her face now that she was letting us see it. Michael put his hand on her shoulder.
"I'm so sorry," he said again.
She kept her hands on Michael and tears grew in her eyes. She didn't want to let him go, somewhere believing that if she held tight onto my brother that her son wasn't fully gone.
"Just like my son. He had curly hair, too."
I remember feeling frightened, and sad, and a bunch of things I didn't know how to put into words. In that moment, I hated the world. I didn't understand how it could be so brutal.
I wouldn't come to regret it until two weeks later when he stopped returning my calls. But that was in keeping with that time in my life. I had never felt farther from myself. The sadness and loneliness I experienced then was unlike anything I had known before. I lived wholly in a surreal time, existing somewhere between now and then. Nothing I did really felt like something I would do. There was some other person controlling my body, my brain, my mouth. I was taking a vacation and I only dealt with how I was behaving in the brief periods where the real me floated back to the surface. And I tried, really hard, to keep that real me at bay.
I don't blame myself. I can be a real buzz kill.
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