April 2021: The Art of Trying Not to Get Washed Away
Dear lovely readers,
For my April letter, I originally planned to write about rebirth, renewal, and hope. I wanted to blast the sunlight, shine something fluttery and bright, and embrace the possibilities of spring.
But my heart got obliterated last week.
And I’ve spent the past few days like an anthropomorphic loaf of bread, sprawled on any and every surface I can find, weeping.
I’m just trying to be a person. And I’m failing.
My sister has been my emotional bodyguard, trying to shield me from pain and also gently deflate my delusions. Any time she says something logical, I close my eyes. I start singing Gwen Stefani, telling her that she’s bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.
I’ve gone to bed crying and woken up crying.
Yesterday, I finally brought my yoga mat back out and tried to follow the low-stakes, twenty-minute lesson. I finished, but I spent the entire time soaking my mat with tears.
Because the truth is I don’t know anything.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know what it means when you let someone see everything about who you are and they decide, in the end, that they don’t want it.
And, my God, this is the first time that movies have truly felt like they were failing me.
When I feel a soft spring of hope, I think about Luke leaving Lorelai and eventually returning months later, ready to start again. I think about Harry rejecting Sally, and then running through the streets of New York to begin the rest of their lives. I think about all the times that characters have behaved poorly, said the wrong things, made terrible mistakes, and how we still rooted for them. We always wanted them to get back together, to make it work, to have that second chance.
When the waves of grief knock me over, when I realize how unlikely any of this is, I think about Angel turning his back on Buffy for the final time. I think about Hubbell abandoning not only Katie, but their young daughter, and then running into them years later with a new partner. I think about all the times that characters died and lied and left, unfeeling automatons who decided they had moved on and they would never, ever return.
Reader, I have lost my mind.
When it first happened, I called a friend. I begged her, Please, tell me what the bad thing is.
She had no idea what I was talking about. And I couldn’t explain that I meant me.
The bad thing, I repeated. The bad thing that makes people leave.
And my friend, a warm, rational person, said, There’s no bad thing.
I’ve seriously considered whether or not I would pull an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Like Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, would I choose to have my memories of him completely erased?
Would I?
The problem, of course, is that I have too many memories. He’s everywhere. Almost every single place I’ve lived, he’s been there. In my favorite city, he’s a co-star of my best moments. I can’t sleep at night because our last few conversations rewind and fast forward in my head, pausing at my worst parts and my worst lines and my worst mistakes. I’m like a football coach, studying the footage, circling the gaps, pinpointing where and when I should have feinted right instead of bulldozing forward. I can’t sleep because my brain keeps haunting my eyeballs. It’s a real dick, my brain. It sends visual middle fingers every chance it gets.
I sleep and I cry and I eat Taco Bell and I walk around my neighborhood like a zombie, listening to Al Green’s “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” Then, to stop myself from walking into the middle of the road, I listen to Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” followed by the terribly-sung middle-school ballad “Mexican Wrestler” by a preteen Emma Roberts.
Do not listen to that song. It is bad.
I listened to it thirty times.
My hands touch the pages of my planner, flipping through the months. I want to fast-forward my life. I can’t do the hard work. Intellectually, of course, I know time is the only solution. But I can’t wait anymore. I can’t do it.
The day after it happened, I washed my hands, squinting at my red-faced reflection. I used to like my hazel eyes. Now I hated them. He used to say that every time he looked into them, he felt like he knew exactly what I was thinking. He felt like we were having a private conversation, speaking a language no one else understood.
I turned to one of my friends. He took my eyes, I said. He took my eyes.
And my friend, a warm, rational person, said, He took nothing. Your eyes belong to you.
It hurts and it hurts and it hurts because I don’t hate him.
It would be so easy to hate him.
It would fill me with self-righteous rage. It would let me list all the horrible things he did. It would grant me a vengeful purpose. I’d be Carrie covered in pig’s blood, ready to wreak chaos. I’d be the Bride in Kill Bill, stalking those who have betrayed her with ruthless purpose. I’d be that sarcastic piggy bank in Toy Story, tossing quips at an astonishing pace.
But I don’t hate him.
And I never will.
I’ll share one memory. Just one.
Years ago, I woke up with a red, swollen foot. I couldn’t even walk on it. Even though it was around six or seven in the morning, I woke him up. He sat up, bleary-eyed, his hair sticking up on the left side of his head like a rooster. I pointed to my foot. It hurts!
His hands touched his dresser, searching for his glasses. He usually wore contacts, but this was an emergency. He plopped them on his head, rubbing his eyes. I poked him. It hurts!
And then he sprinted down the early morning streets of Washington Heights to Duane Reade to buy ibuprofen.
I think that’s the one memory I can’t bear to lose. It’s his sleepy face, his hair spiky like a scarecrow, trying to find his black-rimmed glasses, pulling on his sneakers, and running to the pharmacy even when he could have walked. He chose to run. He was there when it hurt.
Yesterday, I was in the car, staring out the window, crying. Nobody is ever going to buy me ibuprofen at seven in the morning again, I said.
And my sister, a warm, rational person, said, I will.
I’m writing all this down because I want to remember it. I want to make myself believe and trust the people who have come forward to offer me support and affection and tenderness. I’m writing all this down because there is so much love in their words. But I can’t make myself believe it just yet.
Because I want the kind man with the kind heart to come back.
Because I am a person with no eyes, stumbling in the dark, reciting a poem by W.S. Merwin over and over again in her head like a sick joke…
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
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