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?
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