I’ve lost my voice. I retreated into silence when I became weary of myself. It is so much easier to drink, and laugh, and fuck, and mute my emotions under the crushing wave of busy work and cheap thrills.
I’m ready to speak again.
Garrett came back into my life after three years. I never stopped loving him in the three years I didn’t see him, with not even a photograph to sate me — except for the one on Instagram — and when he walked up my driveway, getting out of the same car he used to drive me around in, he was different, but still my Garrett. He had aged a little, and had prominent white in his now-long hair; new glasses that flattered his face; a well-defined chest and the same hands I never forgot, not once, not in three years. Garrett. The love of my life.
It has been a year of loss and pain for me. I have been weighted by my memories and my vulnerability and exposure like I never have before. It’s funny; they tell you you’re supposed to get stronger as you age. I don’t feel stronger. Just more weathered. My trunk has more rings on it, and there are more names carved into my bark; nails hammered in below the flesh; my sap drips from the holes, and I do not feel stronger. My roots are simply deeper now. I’m harder to knock down. But I feel the strong winds more acutely now; there is more surface area that feels the bite of frost.
I went through and deleted our entire email correspondence (every desperate plea for an answer, for a face-to-face meeting, for closure, for clarity, for forgiveness — I asked for so much) and every photograph I had saved of us. Then I sat at my desk and fended off a panic attack. That was it: a spotless mind, just what I had prayed for. The healthiest decision, in the eyes of therapy and friends and self-help lists online. His Made In Detroit shirt, the ruby pendant he gave me for a birthday, and the mix CD on which he had painstakingly typewritten a track list, complete with a hand-scrawled love note inside, sits inside a wooden cigar box in my living room. I had plans to hold a tiny funeral and then winter came two days ago and froze the ground. I am desperate to bury it before the new year. I can’t have his wraith trailing behind me into the next year. I will lose my mind. I will never recover if I don’t do this.
I used to pretend he was dead because I could not justify the level of grief I carried for three years. Now, with my therapist’s permission, I am finally working through the grieving process without shame or secrecy. It must end, though. It will end, right? When? Will I ache like this for the rest of my life? Will I ever find someone who will love me the way he loved me? Will I ever love in quite the same way, quite as wholly and immensely? Or will I have this aching empty space in my chest until I am 93 and breathing my last?
It would have been easier to have never met him, never fallen so madly in love, never had him torn away from me, never grieved like this. I would not be as complex or as world-weathered or as compassionate or as emotional or as humble or as mature, but I would give all of that back to never have to feel this way. Unhappiness is not a beauty mark, or a badge of honour. Grief is painful, and raw, and sickening. It feels like having your guts ripped out every time someone speaks his name. There is nothing fashionable about melancholy. I would return all poetry in exchange for my heart’s peace and a head not haunted by ghosts.
It is hard, today.
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