collect call
sometimes your body reaches a milestone before your mind catches up. every day i think of you, but haven’t cried in weeks — yet here i am, staring into a 7 train sunset, doing lamaze breathing to avoid alarming my fellow passengers. like anyone gives a fuck. if you have to cry in public, there’s no better place on earth than the new york city subway.
even if it’s not a bother to anyone else, it is to me. why is this happening? i thought this part was over. it’s not even your birthday or anything. starting to get the sense that grief isn’t linear, i would tweet if that verb still existed. anyone else notice this? it would get 5.6k likes and a few wellness check texts i’d feel mortified for accidentally soliciting. it’s sad that website’s dead, but probably good. it’s cowardly, inhuman, for me to outsource my manufactured catharsis to thousands of strangers. death should be something you have to sit with.
i chalk up the slump to being exhausted and on my period, but it lasts longer than that. little things, or no thing at all, will set me off. i thought time had begun to seal the gaping hole in my chest, but it was only filled with moss, and now some mystery wind has blown it away. it feels sickeningly good to grieve so acutely again — the last time it hurt this much, you were closer. you had just been alive. it always felt like you were just around the corner. it doesn’t feel that way anymore. though still, at least once a week, i start to text you, see the last message, and remember.
it’s a few days before i pinpoint the likeliest source for the resurgence: in all the time i knew you, the longest we ever went without speaking was about six weeks, after which we both agreed: how did this happen?! that was too long! never again! it’s been nearly three months. how did this happen. how did this happen.
your mother wrote me a letter. i’m sure it was one of hundreds she’s sent over the past few months. the source of your unshakable manners. she deserves a response i haven’t found yet. next week i will be in a new country, watch another sun set in a place you’ve seen, and hope you tell me what to say.
between now and then, i will see fifteen things about that guy we love, that place we went, that show we love, that guy we hate. every time, i will try to talk to you.
sometimes i remember, and try to talk to you wherever you actually are, which is not in my phone. whenever i feel i’m being pulled apart in seven different directions and i’m late and in pain and i’m ransacking my room or my purse because i can’t find my earring or my charger or my fucking keys or all of the above; when it would be so easy to give in, to snap or scream or cry — not on the subway, in a more inconvenient place, where i’d feel a moment’s satisfaction for the small, ugly price of hurting someone else — that’s when i remember to talk to you where you are. i’m not like you; i’m unconscionably selfish, still asking things of you, the patron saint of showing up for people. even when you’re exhausted, even when it’s inconvenient, even when they don’t deserve it.
every time i talk to you — every single time — my hand closes around whatever i seek. overwhelming things feel possible again. i decide to be okay. i think of what a good friend you are, what a good sister and daughter and neighbor, how much better i am at those things for having known you, and reach for my phone to tell you.
❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹