Zombie Apocalypse Team

 Remember that car game we used to play? I remember arguing over who got Michelle because she would obviously be such a ringer. I hope she's doing well these days.

Anyhow all that feels a lot more real lately. I have spent so much time the last few years trying to build the kinds of webs and nets that you always did with people. I imagine you still do that. I was so grateful to be a thread in your chosen family, but I think I still took it for granted. It's such hard work, and I have seen that more and more clearly the last 7 years. I keep thinking I'm at that place with people and then they decide to buy a house and move in with their girlfriend instead of investing in our commune, and I get my feelings hurt, because it feels bad to be the person who's more invested, turns out.

This whole hell of a year. I wonder so often how you're doing. We've been doing occasional careful emails or texts but it's been since May that I heard from you and my Lord, this summer. But it's your turn to email and your turn to text, and I am trying to be good to you now in the only way I can be, which has seemed to me to be mostly keeping my distance. Letting you come closer if you want to. Like a scared kicked dog. Not a completely inappropriate image.

Anyhow, there have been some hangups in trying to weave a chosen family as a hard introvert / thoughtless human in my late 30s, but I am slowly getting there I think. I make it more of a point to be explicit with people about that. To make it clear that I am asking them and inviting them into something that is very real and consequential to me. I don't think most of them want to be on that page with me, but some of them do.

I was remembering recently about one of those nights with Jenny, early on. I think she had just gotten hurt or broken up with or maybe was just too drunk. I remember you holding her on our couch and cradling her head on your lap while she cried and telling her that this was how it would be now, that she was just family and that was all there was to it.

I know we both thought there was no way we would end our relationship without continuing to be with each other. I remember you making me promise not to "Amber N--" you. And our foolish matching tattoo agreement. Turned out we were both wrong about that. Turned out I could hurt you more than I could ever have imagined being able to hurt anyone. I would have killed anyone who had hurt you like that.

I was talking with some friends recently (outside, on the patio, from a distance) about relationships and a few of them were commiserating about being the person who gets letters after the breakup where the other party thanks them for teaching them so much, and apologizes for not learning all that sooner. And one of our other friends was like, wow, that's unbelievable, those people are the worst. And I was like, yeah, that was me.

That thought deserves its own separate entry in this blog you'll never read, but it's true. I think it every time I think of you, which is still often, after all these years. How much you taught me. How immensely grateful I am to have learned it at all. How lucky I am to have learned it at all. How much I wish, how much I would give, to have learned it before I met you.

This is all to say, it's really looking like apocalypse times now. You are still one of the people I would worry about the most, would most want to be safe, to be well. You're still one of the people I would want on my team. I wonder about what would happen in those circumstances. If I knocked on your door in the upcoming apocalypse, would you come with me?

And then I realize it wouldn't matter, because I know your web of chosen family is deeper and broader and stronger than anything I could ever build, and those people will keep you more well than I could, and probably if I ever knocked on your door one of them would meet me with a shotgun.

I miss you. It's wild to think about how long it's been, and that missing is still so fresh. Amanda, I am wanting every good thing for you. I am always wanting that. I hope, whatever happens next...

I don't want to say I hope you'll be safe. None of us will be safe, and you and I have enjoyed our safety on the backs of so many others for so long. But I do want safety for all of us, and especially for you.

I don't want to say I hope you won't be alone, because I can't imagine that you would be, and it seems like even saying that would disrespect the sort of person that I know, that I used to know, you are. But I do want community and support for all of us, and especially for you.

I guess it's just a selfish thing. My heart hurts, to think of you hurting. I hope there is a balm for all of us, somewhere in all this. And especially for you.

I miss you. I love you. Hang in there.

Cheese Fries

Remember that time you ordered me cheese fries from some delivery place in Somerville and you accidentally ordered like 10 orders of cheese fries? I ate cheese fries for like 3 days. Just nothing but cheese fries. Eventually they weren’t very good anymore, but I loved them so much. I loved you so much. You loved me so well.

A Case of You

Just before our love got lost I said
“I am as constant as the northern star”
And you said, “constantly in the darkness?
Where’s that at?
If I want you you’ll be in the bar.”
Later on the back of a cocktail coaster
Beneath the blue tv screen light
I drew a map of Canada—oh, Canada—
With her face sketched on it twice.

She’s in my blood like holy wine
She’s so bitter and so sweet
And I had drunk a case of you
And I was still on my feet
I was still on my feet.

Oh she’s in my blood, she’s my holy wine
She’s so bitter, baby, and so sweet.
And I had drunk a case of you.
And I was still on my feet.
I was still up on my feet.

I loved you first.

She was our sweetest downfall

But I loved you first, I loved you first. 

Between the sheets of paper lies my truth

I had to go. I had to go. 

My hair was long when we first met. 

Samson came back to bed

Not much hair left on his head

He ate a slice of wonder bread and went right back to bed. 

And the history books forgot about us, and the Bible didn’t mention us. 

The Bible didn’t mention us. Not even once. 

She was our sweetest downfall

But I loved you first, I loved you first. 

Beneath the stars came falling on our heads

But they’re just old light. They’re just old light. 

Samson came to your bed

Told you that your hair was red

Told you were beautiful, and came into your bed. 

You cut my hair yourself one night

A pair of dull scissors in the yellow light

And I told you that you’d done alright, and kissed you till the morning light, till the morning light. 

And I kissed you till the morning light. 

Samson went back to bed

Not much hair left on his head

He ate a slice of wonder bread and went right back to bed. 

We couldn’t bring the columns down, we couldn’t destroy a single one. 

And the history books forgot about us. And the Bible didn’t mention us. Not even once. 

She was my sweetest downfall. 

I loved you first. 

I miss you.

You aren't answering my emails anymore. I think if I wrote and pressed you about it you would say something high-handed like, I hoped you would take my silence as a gentler let-down than I am about to deliver but since you haven't taken the hint... and then you would either write something drunk and long and scathing or something short and sober and completely detached and somehow more scathing. You are really cutting when you want to be. You are really getting it all out now.

You are like a live wire in my head. Just land mines everywhere.

Your absence goes through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Congratulations

I am also really angry. I am so angry. Angry at you for being the one who walked away blameless. Angry at all of our friends who chose you, who chose against me. Angry that my private life, the impossible business of my heart, is everybody's fucking business. I don't actually think either of us is blameless here. I think even if things had happened the other way around the result would have been the same. You would still be happily posting pictures of your new lover and all our old friends, and I would be leaving Facebook so that nobody could tag me in pictures of my own wedding. 

I think what happened is that I was the one who stepped. I was the one who stood up and said this is over. I was the one who fell in love; at least I was the one who was willing to own up to that. And I'm the one who gets to take the fall. I know that makes it easier for you. It makes it easier for everybody. I have carried that for two and a half years but I am past denial and bargaining and slamming head on into anger. The truth is that nobody knows what happened between us except us. Nobody else knows what that was like. I don't know what it was like for you, and you don't know what it was like for me. And fuck you and everyone else who seems to think they can judge me. 

You know, some people leave their little babies. Some people leave their partners who are dying of cancer. Some people are abusive and some people are addicts and some people lose all the money on get-rich-quick schemes. And all these people, they're just people too. They're shitty and they're doing the best they can. But no, I'm the one who's the worst. I have done the worst possible thing. I ended a long term relationship after I went away to graduate school and met someone else. Like, yeah, that's kind of shitty, and yeah, it didn't go down that smoothly, but seriously? Seriously? I didn't fucking kill anyone. I didn't turn out to be a secret sociopath. I made a hard, ugly decision (a decision that you agree was the right one, by the way), and it tore me up and it tore both of us up. 

And no, I wasn't there when you were going through it, and it was really hard. Yes. Everybody has told me that. But you know what, nobody was there for me. I was fucking alone. I was fucking crying in the hallways at school. I didn't have anyone who would come and wake me up everyday. I didn't have anyone who would come and sit with me at night so I wouldn't cut myself. (But hey, you know, I didn't.) Of course you have better friends than me. You are a better friend than me! But maybe we could just table the moral judgment. Because fuck you. I tried really, really hard. And honestly--I did a pretty fucking good job, all things considered. But you still win the prize. You get to go about your life with your head high and everybody scattering fucking roses at your feet. Congratulations. 

I googled your name today

I know it's a creepy thing to do. I was watching a show about somebody who's divorced, his dad just died and his ex-wife came to the funeral, and I wondered about your dad, and whether he was okay, and whether I would know if anything happened to him. And then I looked you up. I wanted any little scrap of information the internet could give me. I wanted to see some tiny piece of you.

There are a couple new pictures of you that come up in google's image search. I read the abstract of your dissertation. I swear, I just read it, and I could not right now tell you what it's about. I know you always thought that was because I didn't care, because I wasn't paying attention. It's really just because you're a lot smarter than me. I read it and was impressed, again, like I was every time I made you tell me about it. And then I looked at your picture some more and felt sick. That haircut looks good on you. You look happy.

It's such a particular kind of sick that I feel thinking about you sometimes. I imagine it's like vertigo, which I've never had. It's guilt, and grief, sure, but it's also the sensation of looking at your life through a backwards mirror or something. It's so familiar and so strange. I just played a video game this weekend that involved a lot of time travel, and the people doing the traveling got sick from the feeling of having multiple sets of memories at once. They got nosebleeds. I feel like that, looking at your picture. Sometimes it comforts me, the idea that there are all these parallel worlds that split off from every decision we make, and somewhere there are a million worlds where we stayed together, and in some of those worlds we're happy. Sometimes the vertigo makes me feel sick. Or maybe I just feel guilty, and full of grief, and I miss you so.

This is all so much about me. I am upset because I chose to leave you and now my life has certain doors that are closed. Something I think about often is what you said to me when we were splitting up, and I was crying. You told me I wasn't crying because I was losing you or because of what was happening, I was crying because I was afraid I was a bad person. All about me. I read an article recently about a Pixar movie, and it said that the emotion that actually makes us cry the hardest is the feeling of helplessness. That felt so true to me. You will say: what a crock. I wasn't helpless at all; I made all the choices.

I read a short story the other day in a book of short stories written by a lesbian in the 90s, full of protests and people dying of AIDS and getting labrys tattoos. It was felt like such a different world. In one of the stories there's a couple in therapy together. They actually broke up a few years ago but they are in therapy to process the end of their relationship: why it happened, why it happened like it did. I thought, damn I wish we could do that.

I was telling somebody last week about our matching tattoos, how we had planned to get them, how we would never have imagined that we could end so badly that we wouldn't want them anymore. I tell it now and it sounds so hopelessly naive. But I remember how it felt. I remember when we had those conversations in the first place. I remember being so sure of us, us being so sure of each other. Where did it all go? Where, in the closed universe, where nothing is really created or destroyed, where did those people go?