The end result

I still have that note you gave me. I had just moved into your house and we hardly knew each other. You tried to get close to me, cooking me dinner, trying to coax me out of my room with promises of movies and nights out. I held you at arms length because heartache and I had only recently stopped spending time with each other, and you seemed like the kind of man I could fall down a rabbit hole with. But you were smooth, you don’t give up that easily. You befriended my dog, ահօ is less than a dog than a four legged english butler driven by contempt. We would lie upstairs and cuddle and I would threaten your life if you told anyone about it. That never came from shame. That came from the fact that it felt good and clean and right and I didn’t want anyone talking me out of it. One day I came home and there were flowers on my office chair with a note that said “just because.” They’re the only flowers any man has ever bought me. That note is still in the box under this bed, with all the things that make me me. When we had to leave the house, you told me I could come with you. We had barely been together for a month and yet you acted as if there had never been another option. If you think about it, that leap was crazier then the one I’m taking by myself right now, and I never thought twice about it. And not because the alternative was my parents again. That first apartment was tiny and shitty and we had mice issues and money was tight, but we still managed to have so much fun. We survived the end of your job, we navigated through the nightmare that was Prolab. It’d be Friday night and we’d be broke but still sneak across the parking lot at CBG to raid the vending machine for snacks and then we’d watch TV or talk or have incredible sex and it was everything to me. I felt so safe, so happy, so confident that we were right. Even if we struggled, it was an adventure we took together. We barely fought each other; we fought the problem. That is rare. We managed to find a nicer place, our first real house, together, with a backyard and that red kitchen-do you remember that? I loved that red kitchen; I loved the back yard. It was expensive, but you and I-we knew how to live and still have a great time. And then a bullet got fired from a gun. 2012 was fucking horrible. I hated seeing you suffer so very much, I hated watching your family crumble from within, I hated you bearing the brunt of it, amazed that you could take all of that-the shooting, the death, the hurricane, the eviction, and still you and I never fought. We never argued. We loved each other through it. Some people say that a lack of fighting indicates a lack of passion; I say we loved each other enough to skip the fighting and create the passion. We survived 2012, yes, but 2013 caught up with us, and we were so busy looking over our shoulders at the fires of 2012 that we never saw the thousand foot cliff that awaited us in 2013. God’s cruel joke, we like to say. All of our kisses, all of our hugs, all of our movie trips and date nights and waking up on Saturday mornings to get breakfast, all of the times you would tell me how excited you were to come home to see the smile on my face when you/I walked through the door, all of the love we made, you supporting me through my unemployment, the things we bought, our weekend jaunts to Biloxi, the cons we looked forward to, the trips to Houston we took, the concerts we went to ( I still remember going to Texas for A7X and the look on your face when you looked around and said “I like this! Whoa, I like this a lot”) all the things you introduced me to, the Saenger and Le Miz and Phantom, the nights we’d get bottles of Jack and get drunk and watch a new show together, the drama we went through with our friends, the music we introduced each other to, the way I felt when I’d show you things that you’d never gotten a chance to do in your childhood, how much all that meant to me, trips to Gulf Shores and you giving me a lifelong love affair with Gatlinburg, that horrible trip we took to Gatlinburg with my family, the second time you saving all of our lives during a fire and still willing enough to salvage the trip afterwards, the third time we got it right. I don’t know if I’ll ever see Gatlinburg again, and I don’t know if I can imagine being there without you. You and I being reckless and buying things we really wanted even though we’d have to go on “lock down” afterward, you cooking me dinner after a long Wednesday at work, me staring at the clock on Friday afternoons because I couldn’t wait to start our weekend together, you stopping by the house on night shift to make sure I was okay, the way you’d ask me for a Coke and a smile, the way I feel when you call me Bebe (even now, especially now) or when I’d be upset and you’d find a way to fix it. All of that was running through my head when I left work today, took a right on Williams instead of a left, drove to my soon to be apartment, parked at my soon to be building, walked up three flights of stairs, and stood in front of the door of my soon to be apartment. I just stood there and stared at that door and wondered what kind of life I was going to have behind it, if it was going to be a place where I healed or if it was going to be a place where I struggled. I thought about you and I and everything I typed up above and wondered how the everloving fuck everything you and I had and shared and bled over could lead me to this spot, this moment, this decision. It was enough to make me throw up. My aunt has been telling me to stop crying, do something to make me happy, basically, stop wallowing, stop being a pussy, pretty much. Now more than ever I need to brace myself, to start thinking clearly, because I’m on my own now. And she’s right, but she’s never had to lose you. I’m not stupid. I know you want things I can’t give you. I know more things about you then you think I do, I have gut feelings about things you hide from me, to spare me pain. I know sometimes you wish we had ended a long time ago and I also know you didn’t want to throw me to the wolves, because you’re not a bad man. Far from it. I would hate to ever know you stayed with me out of guilt at the expense of your own happiness, though deep down in my heart I know it’s probably true, even if you loved me and wanted it to work anyway. I’m not innocent of anything either. I know you’ll never read this and I know no one else does, either. I guess I’ve never handled heartbreak very well. I know I used to say that if we ever split up, I’d cut you out of my life. I also know saying that was cruel and stupid. I know we promised we’d hang out and eat lunch and be friends , and I hope we can be, but as I was staring at that apartment door, I felt my feet brushing against the floor of what they call rock bottom, and I’m not sure of anything right now. I just feel cold and weak and the most pathetic I’ve ever felt. So yeah, I came back to LaPlace and I did what I did, and you were irritated with me, and a part of me resented it because I know you have to CYA, but I also know you were worried. I’m sorry to have made you irritated with me, especially after what you just did for me, but I couldn’t face rattling around in the house all night. I thought with a hard night’s sleep, I’d be prepared for whatever I had to face in the morning. Didn’t intend the drama. Wasn’t trying to get your attention.

Once you told me, “Where I go, you go too.” Simple, but it always stuck with me. And now we have this wall between us, and I am too scared to scale it and see now far you’ve walked away. And even when I find the strength to walk away, I’m afraid that I will look behind me and it will be higher than we are both willing to climb, or that it looks much better on the other side. But, c’est la vie.

I feel as if I’m trying to resuscitate a dead body, and I know there’s nothing else to do and I have to let it go, and I know you already have, for the both of our sakes. But that body had so much life. How can it be so dead?