Salisbury.Fake Life

The Moon is You

It’s been a few years since I read your letters. I can’t read them without touching the grief I keep hidden because you’re gone. You are gone and there are so many things I haven’t been able to say since you died.

Reading them this morning, I saw with older eyes just how much you loved me and I feel as though I took it for granted that it would always be there.

That you would always be there.

You told me about how there was a book you wanted to write, your magnum opus, and you wanted to get it done because you felt like you were running out of time. And maybe that day you’d had some foresight, I don’t know.

People always thought you were so grumpy and so cranky and angry at the world. With good reason, because you were, but they didn’t know it was because of how hard you loved. You gave everything to what you loved. So much of yourself there was barely any left for you, and what you saw in yourself, you despised.

Your brother sent me all the letters I sent you when he was clearing out your apartment. You’d kept the whole stack. The mountain of letters, you called it once. I have them rubber-banded with yours to me. It doesn’t feel right to separate them. I read the last one in the pile I sent you (even though I know I sent you one for your birthday the year before you died, that one is not in the pile), and it made me desperate to know if you actually believed I loved you.

And would you find it silly of me to miss you with such a desperation now, six years after you’ve died? I can barely look at that grief, Henry. I can’t even glance at it because your loss is indescribably awful. I won’t say you’ve ruined love for me, but you have made it next to impossible for me to ever feel loved by someone as much as you loved me.

I wish I could sit in the stillness of a thunderstorm with you.

Salisbury.Fake Life, Uncategorized

Acceptance

A small backstory for this is I lost a friend of mine a few years ago when he took his own life. For the longest time it crushed me because I was worried I didn’t do enough to help him, to keep him. His birthday is today, and in the past I’d become a useless mess because I didn’t want to face the overwhelming sadness. I miss him most especially today. The piece below is something I wrote last year for him. There’s sadness today, but also joy because I got to know him even if it was for a short time.

Acceptance

It takes a lot of effort sometimes to remember the good moments when you’ve lost someone really close. Sometimes the grief is more than a wave. It’s a vacuum and you can’t feel anything but the pressure of that loss, the pressure of the absence of the person you loved. They can’t make jokes about how innocent you were. They can’t send you twenty-five YouTube videos of their favorite metal songs for you to wake up to. They can’t stay up until all hours of the night just because they love the sound of your voice.

You romanticize these moments. Look back on them with a fondness you never felt while they were here. Because they were here. You didn’t need to remember them fondly yet. You could keep talking even though your throat was sore and the birds were chirping and oh shit, man, I gotta work in four hours. I’ll talk to you later.

You gave so much of your love without knowing you had and now there’s nowhere to put it. So it bubbles over and leaves you with a displaced mess of smiles for boys with an Irish lilt to their voice, for those friends of yours now who ask if you want to talk about history, or go into why you’re slacking on your writing. You no longer hear that beautiful voice, but you remember the way it filled your heart with a hello, hey, I missed you.

It’ll be all right, you tell yourself. And it is. It’s absolutely okay. But sometimes it’s okay to miss them and accept you’re still sad about it.

written july 27, 2020

I watched Bo Burnham’s “Inside” last night and it’s kind of stuck with me in a big way. It rendered me speechless, but it was 2 A.M. and I was lost in remembering Robbie, lost in the sound and art of “Inside,” lost in wanting to just create forever. The world can often feel too large and yet still too close all at once and it’s so easy to get stuck in a loop of existing. Letting the world slide over you while you try to come back to what you’ve worked so hard to become. It ends up feeling like nothing.

But there’s a moment. A last ditch effort, that sniff of “not yet, I can’t give up yet,” and it propels you forward for a moment and lets you feel real. Like you’re invincible and everything is yours.

On my drive home at the end of summer, when the days start getting shorter, and the sun hangs lower in the sky at 7 p.m. The gold covers the earth and for a half hour I am okay. I see the world as I love to, without the filter of what keeps me up at night. It is striking and stunning and it is mine. That is the world I exist in with Robbie. With Henry. With all the ones I love. It’s the rush of air coming in through my windows, in the breath of sweet grass baked in the sun all day. I am the realest I’ll ever be and it is enough.

Salisbury.Fake Uncategorized

Dear Henry

It’s been a bit since I’ve written to you. It’s not that I don’t want to. I could write to you every day, probably. I get stuck when I try to, though, because I don’t know what to say to you. I love you and miss you aren’t enough for how I feel without you. I’ve tried to find something to fix the planks your death tore off my walls and I’ve been doing a terrible patch job. Crushes on celebrities, falling for a married man (that was weird, you would have laughed at me, but not rudely). I haven’t written poetry much either. Because you won’t read it. I usually wrote it for you anyway. Not that it was about you. I knew you’d read it and that made me feel seen.

You saw me, Henry. You saw me for who I am without wondering what the mess was around me. Maybe I wasn’t messy to you, I don’t know. What I do know is there will never be anyone who comes close to you. How do you love someone when you’ve already loved and lost your soulmate? I know, you’d find that rather silly and call me a silly girl, but I’d be your silly girl.

My therapist (you’d like her, she’s great) told me the love would just be different, it wouldn’t be less or more, it’d just be different and she’s right (she usually is). She’s right. But I still can’t read your letters without becoming a sobbing mess. I tried to today. I really did try, but reading your last words to me reminded me I won’t get any more words. And I want them. I want to hear how your writing is going, I want to hear how your brother is doing (I think about him a lot), I want to talk books, history, all the things we talked about when you were here. And I want to hear you love me.

I miss you. On nights when the moon is clear in the sky, I tell myself it’s you saying hi, that you’re all right, that you don’t feel bad anymore. It’s been three years, but when I think about it, it still feels like you died last night and I can’t breathe and I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. I wish it didn’t make me sad, I know you wouldn’t like knowing this makes me sad, but it does and I just want to be your Carla again.

I love you.