Smiling Through It/Girlfriends & Graduations

It's been a while since I've written, friends. A lot has happened in a short time. I signed a lease and decided to stay in the city (well, in the opposite order). I moved in, and have a roommate for the first time in almost 10 years (heeeey D. Thanks). I made a conscious decision to live with someone...I still don't do so well with being alone. It's like being scared of the dark, when the dark is what's inside your own head. My parents brought back a lot of my furniture, my former life (no cats though; D is a allergic and they aren't allowed here...plus finding reasonable, good housing is ridiculously difficult). Work has been a whirlwind and intense and crazy. And, I didn't have internet until a few days ago at the new apartment, which we lovingly call the Zombie Fortress. Or Zombie Safehouse, depending on your perspective (hashtag a sense of humor). So, here we are, caught up, more or less.

At the time, this would have been a now, but instead it's a then, because time slipped by before I could tell you about it. So let's go back a bit, yeah?

May 21, 2014. The day that K received his Juris Doctor. A Wednesday, smack in the middle of the week and life and things. Early morning, I am in a car down to New Jersey. Man, I hate going to Jersey now. My stomach is riding high up in my ribcage and my eyes are threatening to spill over before we even so much as make it onto the west side highway. On the way over the GWB I'm thinking about how long it takes to fall, and the article I read in the NYT about how the Golden Gate Bridge has the highest number of suicides of any bridge in the country (what is it about serenity and the expanse that comes with the west coast that makes people so committed, I wonder). I can't imagine jumping, having enough time to think and change your mind and it's too late. Or maybe it's all peace and ease and relief? It's not my style, but for some reason it's my thought now. And then just as quickly, we're in Jers, we're in the town I spent the last 6 years in, we're pulling up to K's parent's house. And then it's his little brother at the door for me, and I'm in the living room, perched on the same wood chair I pulled into the kitchen the day of the accident, the same chair where I hugged my knees to my chest and realized that K and I didn't get to grow old together anymore. The day my life changed.

I'm sitting across from K's foldout couch bed, watching his dad tie on K's favorite purple tie ("I'm going to borrow this, okay boy?" K's brother, tightly: "come on Dad..."), me with my eyes wet as I glaze over the poster board of condolences from the kids at the law school, and the funeral program, a framed picture of K, a collage of our pictures that I made him one year for his birthday...and his ashes. His ashes. Again. His ashes. The body of my beloved all crumbled up into something I can't hold or kiss, something that can't laugh or talk, some-thing. Not someone. Not my someone. The beginning and end inscribed on the side, a whole person paired down to dust and dates. Fuck. I'm crying and apologizing to his little brother. I hadn't meant to cry so soon. I'm trying to stop the tears before his mom comes out from getting dressed. I can't, but I'm trying. And so I'm trying to smile through them, smile through all my pain. It's all I've done since January. It's all I know how to do anymore.

We're on our way now, K's family and me, and his little brother's girlfriend. I'm happy to see her, but she seems less so to see me. I know what it's like to be The Girlfriend (more on that in a minute), to be there but not really there, just a fixture for moral support and companionship. I don't know if she feels that way, but I have in the past. More than once in my life. At the graduation, we are escorted to the front. When the processional starts, I'm in tears again. They are pouring uncontrollably down my face, and I don't care if I'm streaking my makeup. K should be here, damnit. He fucking earned this. 2.5 years of hard fucking work, and more late nights than undergrad. No one knows better than me, sitting up with him, reading his case law out loud when he got too tired, quizzing him until I understood the difference between first and second degree murder and manslaughter, or what all the requisites are for a contract (consideration, it's all about consideration). All the hours spent pouring over jobs and fine tuning resumes and cover letters, and learning what kind of law firms K would like. So many hours it was days, weeks. He should be here, damnit, with his class.

Every speaker mentions K in one way or another. I don't know if that was planned, but it makes me proud. I assume it makes his family proud too, but I can only speak for myself. And then it's time. I wish I wore the title of wife, so I could have gone up on stage and gotten his hood and his degree. Instead, the dean called his father up and the whole auditorium erupted into a standing ovation. And my tears were uncontrollable, all the emotion pent up behind my eyes all these months streaming full down my face. But not just with sadness friends, with pride. I don't think I was ever prouder of K than I was in that moment. And I KNOW he was proud. And he should be, up there in heaven. I know he was dancing because he always danced a bit. Always for as long as I knew him, a little pop-lock here, Michael Jackson moonwalk step there. Always a bit of a joke to make someone laugh. I know he was laughing, and dancing, and whether or not you believe in heaven or afterlife or anything, I know he was there in that moment, full of pride and completely deserving of all of the love and adoration and sadness that filled the auditorium in that moment.

After, and we're meeting a few people now. Some friends, and parents of students. "This is K's girlfriend" his parents say. And it's true, I am his girlfriend. I'm also his partner, would be wife. Girlfriend is so fleeting, so teenager. I hate it. I hate the casualness, the insignificance. The way it feels like I don't matter when I know I mattered to K more than he ever let on to anyone but me. I can cherish it, sure, but I hated the way I felt pushed to the side. The way the only possessions I have are a few t-shirts from our trips, a hat, a scarf and a leather bracelet. That's it. I don't even have the second copy of his degree that the law school gave (they give two), or the pictures we took together in a photo-booth in Florida, our last vacation (his dad keeps them in his car). I can count the number of photos we have together almost on one hand; we always took pictures of each other, but didn't necessarily take them together. And sure I have photos and memories, but there's something about the way the soul lives on in things, the way our energy embodies the possessions we love, leaving little traces behind everywhere. I wish I had more of those little traces so maybe combined all together I'd have something significant of the person who captured my heart for the last decade of my life.

So now that this chapter is done, the emotion is coming harder and heavier. Tears are disobedient and flowing more freely, more unbidden. Smile through it, smile through it. My anger is quelling and quiet, but still stirs on occasion. My stomach is unsettled with unfairness even now, and my frustration that people think I'm fine because some months have passed is louder than ever. Sometimes I feel like I'm laying just under a pool of shallow water, looking up at the sunlit surface. Everything is slightly off, slightly blurry. And I'm screaming but no one can hear me, I'm drowning so slowly that no one notices. A friend asked if I was okay the other day...the answer is still not really. I don't know when I'll be okay. I don't know if I ever will be (please don't reassure me. It doesn't help. I just want to be heard). My missing is so loud these days, my heart so heavily broken it hurts in my chest. I don't wish for a time machine, except late at night when it's still and loudly silent and I feel like God might have a moment to listen...and then I beg to be just a bit selfish, just to go back and fix that night. I beg to not be alone anymore.

All my love is misplaced and wandering now, and it all feels so wrong. Being "the girlfriend" and having no claim to anything feels wrong. It's all so unnatural to me, and yet I go on. Sometimes I wonder why I do, how I do. I don't know. I just do. And the smiles and laughter...it's all so false. It's all so useless. But here it is anyways, leaking through, trying to convince the rest of me we have to keep living.

And on that note, goodnight friends. May the next time be a little sooner, and just perhaps an inch less painful.

Music Redux: Childish Gambino - I'd Die Without You

Dig Deep

Dig deep, my mom said to me the other night. After her friend died in a car accident. After her horse died from a sudden onset illness. And I thought, what does that mean? What am I digging into, when I feel freshly dug earth, when I feel like shallow ground? Maybe there is some way to turn all this from scorched to consecrated? Or maybe not.

Everyone who's been on the outside, all of the I don't know what to says and am I saying the right things, dig deep with me. Dig deep and understand that it's not about advice given (and I've said before, it's really not advisable to give advice at all, although the desire to do so is certainly understandable) or the way you see me. It's not about you at all, and it's not even about me. It's about K. It's about everyone who lost this brilliant, funny, special young man long before it should have been his time. It's about parents who lost their eldest son, about a younger brother who lost the older. It's about old friends who fell out of touch not realizing that there was an end date on the "last time we spoke" and friends who were new and still developing. And then there's me. It's about The Girlfriend, would-be fiance, never-going-to-be wife, and not-mother. The love realized for so long, but somehow so short by comparison to lifetimes. Inconsequential by the definitions of the universe or God. All of us, missing K in our own way, learning to live with out him in our own way. All of us, digging deep.

You understand my vantage point perhaps, because I chose to be vocal. Because I cope by talking, and writing, and expressing. Because I am built to love and be open (I'm a Leo, all fire and passion as we are, all magnetic, catalyzing and angsty). Because I don't know what else to do with my broken heart, with the micro-realizations of OHGODHOWISTHISMYLIFENOW that might only ever come across to you in smiles slight and weak. Or sometimes in rushes of anger. Or weariness. I am so fucking weary. I'm weary of humans. Of men who think it is a good time to tell me about their attractions RIGHT NOW, of people minimizing and trivializing, who think I should be "over it"...or maybe just forgetting that 4 months might be yesterday and forever all at the same time as far as I'm concerned. To be clear, I don't say or write anything I don't want to. I don't feel like I have to tell you anything. There is no obligation or expectation on my end. So I ask, dig deep and leave yours behind. Try and remember who you're talking to, that the absence still exists. That my smiles and active engagement are there to protect us both.

This came up the other day: why bother protecting anyone? Why bother faking normalcy? Because the other option isn't an option. The other option is anger. It's letting you understand that you are striking a raw nerve ALL THE TIME. It's a sobbing mess, incoherent, so low it becomes nonexistent. And if there is one thing I cannot, will not do, it is lose my existence. I cannot dishonor K that way. I cannot collapse into myself, or give in to the hollowness inside of me. To be clear, I do not fake normal for you. I fake it for me, as tiring as it is. I fake it because anything else isn't even survival. It's not even base. And that I just refuse.

I have missed K from day 1, but every day it grows. I miss talking to him, and having someone who loves me so much, they put me first, just as I am putting them first, so that we are always trying to do the best thing for one another and nearly always getting what we need. I miss companionship and consistency. I miss the respect of someone who is emotionally invested in you. I miss love. Someone asked what I will do, with all this longing. I don't think missing and longing are the same thing. I don't long for K. That's pointless. I do miss him though and I doubt I will ever stop. And when it comes to what I will do, well, I suppose I will do what I have been doing. I will try to heal as best I can. I will keep writing. I will try to figure out how to do more than survive. I will dig deep, and keep growing, as we all are meant to.

I do not believe in "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger." I do not think I am stronger for this, and sometimes I feel like it IS killing me, at least the parts of me that are caring and human. Nor do I believe we are defined by our adversities, or even in spite of them. I don't believe that we are tested, or stretched just to capacity, no, I think sometimes we are pushed past limits and we break. At times, we are given more than we can handle.  But I think at the end of the day, that is our survival mechanism, our means of evolution. Not opposable thumbs or invention. The ability to be pushed and pulled and broken and to continue on because we realize there isn't another choice. For all of us making that choice, for all of us digging deep, that is how humanity has survived for so long. That is how we evolve, and how we become better. Think of all the times that something brilliant and hopeful grew out of something tragic and heartbreaking. I could give you examples, but I think it'd be more meaningful if you thought of it on your own. A little homework for once. We are incredible that way, humanity. The bad may be ever so very bad, but the good, oh I believe in the silver lining of the good. Because what do any of us have, if we don't have hope that something good can come after something like this?

Until the next time.