Right Choices Wrong People

You have permission to take an eraser to the past two years. You sucked the blood from that stone. You don’t have to be haunted anymore.

So yes, choose to fall madly in love. The next time, go in with your eyes open. Do it with the right person.

You will go visit a rock star while he’s on the road in North Carolina. Yes, you’re young (ish), so having romantic adventures is the right thing to do. He’s not the right person to do it with. He has problems you've known too well. The similarities frighten you.

Wait four months. 

Something good is coming your way.

Losing him taught me people die two deaths.

Once, when they're heart stops beating and again when you stop speaking their name.

I keep dreaming of babies and apparently that means new beginnings. 

I still have the kind of anxiety about him as I do panic about my curling iron. I will be at a meeting and then I’ll have a sudden flash of my house burning down. Did I turn it off? I left it on, didn’t I? No, it’s off, I remember turning it off. About him, it will be the middle of the night and I’ll wake up with, what if I had done that one thing different? Did I really have the say that? 

For the record, I have never returned home to my things in flames. And no, I didn’t really have to say that.

Danny

I take naps in the afternoon. I quit drinking, unsuccessfully. I write. I quit drinking, successfully. I look at Tumblr. I think about new things to write. I think about how I should be writing more. I don't sleep at night. I take sleeping pills and I feel hung over the next morning. I stop taking sleeping pills. I have a lot of meetings.

I go over things in my head. I wonder where I went wrong. I worry about you. I write you an email that's too long and I say I know you'll never read it. I am still disappointed when you don't write me back. That makes me worry about me.

I have conversations with you in my head all the time. I try to stop, I can't. I go for dinner with friends. I don't talk about you anymore because nothing I say makes you feel farther away. I still cry but not as often. I'm pretty skinny again. I cut my hair. I am steady wondering about you, remember that?

I give your books away to my best friend and she takes them to Scotland. "Please. Take them. I don't want them." She leaves your bookmark on my dining room table. I don't have the heart to throw it out. I make plans for the future. I picture myself in a new life. In that new life, when this is just a memory, I don't think of you that much.

I want to say I am better for loving you, but I'm not yet. I'm just different. 

I know that even if everything else in your life was corrupted, you loved me with more hope than you knew existed inside you.

As someone who loved you the same, I'm sorry it turned out like this. 

“It’s hard to move forward when you don’t know what way you’re facing.” 

...

Writing came to me like a gift, like something I didn’t deserve. It was like shaking hands with the love of your life on a hot summer night, on a street corner in Montreal, the day after you were supposed to be gone already. He wore a blue shirt and I wore a pink dress.

Like him, writing hit me like a freight train. Like him, writing found me when I wasn’t looking for it but needed it most.

In the just over the year I had with the man I met on a street corner, the so far and maybe ultimate love of my life, there was a lot of rap music. There was dancing, talking, reading, watching, travelling, a voice I felt like I’d always known, his hand on the small of my back and sleeping well for the first time in my life. There was a lot of happy. 

There was not a lot of writing.

“Can you imagine if we’d never met?” I asked him.

“I don’t like to think about that,” he said.

We broke up a month ago. Things I didn’t like to think about are now the reality I live in. Here I am, waking up every night at 4 am, jolted by an alarm I didn’t want to set. I feel like everyone else lives on Planet Earth. I live Planet How The Fuck Did This Happen? Planet Make This Go Away.

But mostly, I live on Planet He’s Gone. 

Lying awake, I have come closest to the understanding that God, or whoever, doesn’t fuck around. He gives but He also takes and doesn’t need to give anything back. I have been forced to accept that time and loss are enemies and best friends. I need time to move past this, but the more time that passes the more what I’ve lost is really gone. 

Last night my friend Molly looked at me in Café Diplomatico, an Italian joint on College Street that’s very popular and not very good. “I wrote an article that comes out tonight,” she said. “It’s called Don’t Cheat On Your Loneliness. I saw that written in a bathroom stall. Isn’t that perfect?”

Last night, in a taxi I didn’t need to take, I thought, “Fuck. All I do lately is cheat on my loneliness.” And why shouldn’t I? How do I be true to something I hate so much?

“Write, I guess,” I heard a small voice say. But I don’t want to write. I want this to be over.

Last night, at 4 am, awake again, I listened to that small voice because it’s really hard to ignore when my house is so quiet.

“Write,” she said. 

She told me that through writing, one day, things will change. That one day, everything I write won’t be for or about him. With fingers pressed up against that keyboard, the lingering sense of him will have faded. That by writing; not by texting other men, not by seeing psychics, not by visiting rock stars in North Carolina, I will have not cheated on my loneliness.

I fell asleep.

I woke up again hours later. Today is the first day since we’ve broken up that I’ve sat back at this computer.

Of all the things that feel true lately, and there are many, the following remain the most shining and resolute. I need to be faithful to this heartbreak. Only by stretching myself in the direction of loneliness will I come back again.  By writing alone, listening to a rap song he would fucking love, I will see what happened between he and I not as a tragedy but as my becoming. One day, I won’t miss him like this. One day, I will hope everyone gets to fall in love like we did.  One day, I will understand why this happened.

Until then, I’ll write. 

That last time I visited him. The last time we made love. The last time I felt that the happiness we had was not destined to self-destruct.

Go over it, over, over. No, again. Again. Again.

One more time it's going to make sense. 

In that moment, I heard my heart break, like a flower stem snapping, a clean, small sound.

I wish I could go back to believing, knowing beyond any doubt, that this dangerous and fragile thing between us could have lasted forever. That it wasn't dangerous. That it wasn't fragile.

That it was good and mine forever.