My voice is back and now it’s everyone’s problem.

It is the great fear, though, that the voice only comes back in waves, during these times, those of hardship and grief and deep, deep longing. How tragically ironic that my voice which I parade around as being such a naked and true reflection of myself is entirely dependent on how deeply I’m feeling certain absences. It feels like all I know how to write about anymore. Even when it was slowly on the mend, it was still always about you. About how I wasn’t thinking about it. How I was learning to cope and do it well for once. How I didn’t miss you as much and the weirdness that I felt because of it. Even when I was trying so much to make it about something else. It was still about you.

The gravity at the core of my dread is that someday I’m going to be writing wedding vows to someone else, and they’ll still be about you. 

I don’t really know what it was. There was no trigger. It was just a wave, like they are. Which is how it always was with us anyway, the push and pull, the lull of the water. You felt very ‘all encompassing’ to me. An ocean in your own rite, what with its depth, its cosmic clarity, its vastness mirroring God. Like you perhaps could have controlled the moon, pulled it down by a little string like one would close a blind. 

I play back that night, like how everyone everywhere is constantly living in a mental replay of their own most significant nights, but not speckled and warped with things I would have done differently, or things I would have changed. I play it back like a record that’s becoming fuzzy, a DVD with scratches from affectionate hours spent repeating. As someone who has a very difficult time trusting my own memory, when I even have access to it, this is one of the truest and most fond couple of hours that I keep in the brain box. Very specifically I think about the picnic table after we were finished eating, and it was getting cold and I was undoing and rebraiding my hair, and you were talking to That Other Guy who I’d never met and you were losing terrible track of time. The sun was going down behind the North skyline and I was watching it on your face and I knew a lot of things right then. I knew every single thing in the world right then, in the hollow of your temple, in the wide fruit rind of your smile. And I was leaning on my elbow watching you talk without listening to any of it and I was feeling the complete obliteration of my heart in anticipation because I knew exactly what was coming. Jesus Christ. I was just watching your laugh and the lines it made, like ripples in a bowl of water. And you were painted completely gold by the sinking sun, although endearingly unaware of how beautiful you were. When I clutch the cross and cry at night this is the image in my head. Michelangelo’s David on my roof, in my hands, bleeding into my blood a holiness I will never know again. 

I was so catastrophically, massively, horrifically and stupidly in love that it frankly passed me by and I almost didn’t realize it until it was too late. But there were a few weeks at the end, after I had realized, and before the worst had happened, where I got to sit in the knowing. And it was really something incredible, to watch myself be alive like a flower in your hands. To watch myself be in love while knowing I was in love without any fear of anything going wrong.

Unsurprisingly it’s worse now to know, now that I have to look back at all the months and pick out different things, like when I was in love with you here and there and all of these little interactions where it was practically exploding out of me like mercury from a lightbulb and I just didn’t notice. I have to look back in the cloudy annals and see your fingerprints all over it. And mine. What a horrid bruised symphony we composed.  

Every morning this last week I’ve woken myself up either laughing, crying, or reaching out to grab, and it’s always something to do with you. The dreams just get worse and worse. I don’t even know who’s behind the screen anymore. What MK Ultra bullshit scheme they’re pulling on me. You’ve won! You’ve won. You were always going to. When I was getting sewn back together in the ER, I didn’t think to call anyone, I didn’t really jive with the idea of people seeing me like that. When I was in the most pain I was thinking about you. With the needle completely through my hand and the ripping sensation making half my vision black. Like a child, how you revert when you’re in pain. Two summers ago when I was kicking a lethal habit. Alone laying down in a dark room covered in sweat, all I wanted was you at the foot of the bed.