Say You'll Remember Me After They Give You A Sponge Filled With Vinegar

Dear K,

It was so good to talk to you tonight. We really let those floodgates rip. I didn't call you because you texted me on my way home from work, I think I would have called you anyway. I called you because I knew in that moment that I needed to talk to you. Somehow over the years we have formed a bond where I just let everything fly at you.

Thank you.

When we got off the phone you were walking into a bar and so was I.

I sat down and ordered a martini. The bar was almost empty. Seven O'clock on a Wednesday. I started talking with the strangers at the bar. Well, stranger. She was the only other person there by herself, and I felt light and free, and so I pulled out all the stops and I was as charming and interesting and positive as I could be. I was too friendly.

After she asked my name I got wise.

I pushed in all the stops I'd pulled out. I met up with friends and said nice to meet you.

I spent the night talking to my friends and texting that old wound in my heart. The one that won't heal. The one that lives in Atlanta. It's still bleeding. As I was picking at it in front of my friends, I'd put down my phone and say that I needed to stop, it wasn't healthy. They laughed it off, but I kept sticking my fingers in, kept pulling at the edges looking for the signs of wear, looking for scars. By the end of the second martini I was ready to rip the whole damn thing out.

There aren't any scars. I've got a god damn stigmata on my heart.

On the walk home I realized that maybe nothing heals in there, maybe some things just pierce us deeper and truer, like spears that run us through. Maybe all we can do is let it consume us, let our hearts pump our lifeblood out in big watery spurts over the sidewalk. Maybe we should tear those wounds wide open and jump in. Maybe we should get down off of our crosses and really take a look. Maybe we should just do what we know we want to do but we're too scared to do. Maybe we should stay on our crosses and suffer for all eternity.

Or maybe we should forget the whole thing and go into the desert.

I don't know.

I'm tired and I'm going to bed.

All My Earthly Love,

K

my only swerving

Dear K-

Sometimes I wonder whether happiness was made for people like you and me. I keep thinking back to something you said the other day, when we talked on the telephone.

We should try to talk on the telephone more often. To each other, at least. I am not good on the telephone, but somehow you help me get past that. It doesn’t matter if I am crying, or laughing, or even just sitting quietly, listening to the sound of your life so many, many miles away…something about it feels relaxing. Enjoyable. I feel comfortable speaking to you in ways I don’t talk to anyone here. I don’t mind that you know I am damaged goods, that I worry about everything in such excruciating detail, or that you know I can be a terrible person. Sometimes it feels good to talk to someone who knows your faults. The faults that don’t always readily show.

Anyways, I keep thinking about what you said the other day, while you browsed for groceries and I folded my laundry. You said that perhaps happiness isn’t something we should strive for. Perhaps happiness isn’t the culmination of a successful life. For some reason I have always thought of happiness as something like the end reward, the proof that you’ve done everything well in life, worked really hard and put in your dues, and in return some unknown force of the universe provides you with happiness and contentment. Maybe you strived away at a miserable job for years and hated every moment but you put in good, honest work and tried to always be nice to your co-workers…then one day, out of the blue, you are given the opportunity to step into your dream job. The job where you look forward to working every day. The job where you feel fulfilled and productive. Or maybe you have been very attentive to always treating others how you would like to be treated, never turning away from someone in need, even when it might have put you out…And then viola! One day, you meet that perfect someone and you get married without a single god-damn doubt in your mind, and you live a beautiful and satisfying life until you both die, after which your children tell your grandchildren about how you and pop-pop were so in love, and how you died within 20 minutes of each other because you couldn’t bear the thought of living on without the other.

But I’m realizing that is not how life works. Especially if I’m behind the wheel. Even if I am in the perfect situation, I seem to find a way to steer everything off the bridge and into the river. Is it because I am a person that isn’t meant to feel happy? Maybe I don’t know what to do with happy. I’m trying to stop thinking about trying to become happy. Maybe, just as you aren’t ready for romance, maybe I’m not ready for happiness. As much as I want it, maybe I can’t have it right now. Maybe I will never have it. As you said, this whole show ends at some point, so perhaps I shouldn’t waste so much of it lamenting over what isn’t meant to be.

The other day I was thinking back to when we used to meet to play chess in a coffee shop that probably has long since closed its doors. I was reminiscing upon it so fondly, wondering why my life couldn’t still contain such simple pleasures. But then I thought about it a little longer, and remembered that those games also used to cause me great stress and frustration. I was so competitive that I wasn’t easily able to relax and appreciate the game for what it was supposed to be: a mechanism to bring us together to chat and share some coffee. Instead, I became so concentrated upon the embarrassment of losing that I shied away from those meetings.

I wish I could slap my younger self, tell her to straighten up and look beyond the game. I would kill to be able to wander to the local coffee shop every week and kill a few hours moving pieces clumsily over a board while talking about life, writing, relationships… Instead I sit in my office, staring at a wall covered with little snapshots of my past life, sipping at some lukewarm, instant coffee blend. Why do I keep these pictures here? To remind me what I’ve lost? To remind me what a beautiful thing it is to be alive?

I listened to the radio this morning. They were describing a man as “the most humble, caring man you’d ever meet”. “He’d never talk about himself”, they remarked. Such a selfless, compassionate character with wit as sharp as a knife’s edge. It got me to pondering. Maybe I think too much about myself. I always twist everything into my perspective. Perhaps I need to become a shadow. Listening attentively but physically incapable of being in the spotlight. Perhaps then I wouldn’t take everything so personally and the world wouldn’t hurt so much. But then I wonder what the point of living would be if I wasn’t meant to feel at all. I’m going about it all in the wrong way.

I can’t be kinder to myself. I’m still too dissatisfied with the product. We both seem to have difficulty finding the good parts in ourselves.

Remember the good times for what they were, but know that they can never occur again in their original skin. You will never again hold her in your arms the same way and breathe in her scent, I will never sway back and forth in the trams of Brno with my head resting on the shoulder of a gentle Slovenian, and we will never return to drink on a couch-covered porch at twilight on a lonely street in Kirksville. We are both longing for feelings that can’t return. But maybe we can find something similar to fill the void, at least for the time being.

Our lives are a poem. There’s so much meaning lurking between what's visible on the page.
-K

Smiling As The Rocks And Oceans Cover Us.

Dear K,

This is all going to be terribly disconnected.
Treat it like a poem.
I wish somebody had said that to me when I was little.
That would be a good way to live your life.
Like a poem.
I guess.

I know I'll be happy someday. I know I'm not right now. I broke up with her. I ended my longest relationship. There were very real reasons, but that doesn't make it hurt any less. I'm lying in bed. I've been staring up at my ceiling fan feeling so sorry for myself for the last two hours.

I created an OKCupid account and deleted it before it was completely set up. I did the same with Tinder. I know now that those things don't work for me.

I want a romance. I want to be ready for a romance.

I'm not ready.

It's going to take me some time to get ready.

I want to make sure that I love myself before I love somebody else.

Look, this whole thing is going to end. Your life. My life. The world's ability to support life. Everything is going to end. We're going to do. That is not up for debate. There is no negotiating around that. Everything ends.

I told her as quick as I could that I thought we should break up. She was expecting it because I had talked to my sisters that day. She was worried about me talking to my sisters. She was worried that they would convince me to break up with her. They didn't convince me, my mind was already made up. It was my gut that did it.

Everything ends, but still moments are suspended. I imagine the past as frozen echoes that are still there. You and I are still drinking on a porch in Kirksville, Missouri somewhere back there.
Somewhere back there I'm still stroking her hair and breathing in the smell. I'm still holding her hand as we walk. I'm still grabbing at her belt loops and pulling her in to kiss me. I'm still telling myself that her middle name is Forever.

That's how it was in my phone.

I looked through pictures I took from our relationship tonight.

That was a mistake.

All of the good times have flooded back into me.

My pillow is soaking up what makes it down my cheek.

God I miss her. I just want to talk to her. I just want to go back, not forever, but just for the night.

Then I think to myself how lucky I am to feel all of these things and the pain lessens. Pain can be turned to joy, it happens, sometimes.

I called an old friend from college tonight. One I used to put on a pillar and call it love. We talked for an hour and a half until I threw up. I think it was a combination of bad tea, cigarettes, and old unrequited feelings that I should have dealt with a long time ago. Somethings never get back in their box.

I need to be kinder to myself.

You need to be kinder to yourself.

You've always been nice to me, turn some of that back on yourself.

You know why I titled this "Smiling As The Rocks Cover Us" ?

Because someday the mountains will crumble. Someday you'll be buried in the dirt. Someday I'll be buried in the dirt. Our lips will melt away, eaten and consumed.

We'll Be Smiling As The Rocks And Oceans Cover Us,
Because It Was So Good To Have Lived,
K