I wish it were just a dream.

You are everywhere and nowhere. Every day for 24 years you’ve made an appearance in my thoughts or dreams. Every day.

My kid talks about getting lost in the halls looking for automotive class and I remember my paper thin baggy overalls specked with paint… I remember the cool of the brick sill pressed beneath my hands, long blonde hair pushed against the window that overlooked the courtyard. I remember your hands slipping between the denim bib of my overalls and sliding over my shirt behind my back with forbidden kisses planted on my neck beneath my ear. I can remember your hands running through my hair, cupping the back of my head. My ears burn now of tactile memories, footsteps we trailblazed that year crossing in front of the auto lab my son now walks across… in that same hall, in front of those same courtyard windows that saw everything.

I don’t know what hurts more, having lost you again or knowing that I didn’t and won’t get to touch you or curl into your chest and just exhale the world and 18 years of feeling incomplete off of me.

Love, wild unapologetic love is terrifying. Having your heart laid out in front of you with all of your demons, flaws and your secrets wide out in the open is even more terrifying. I’ve been ignoring my heart; turning my head away from the dismantled mess splayed out before me… my eyes clenched shut to force the sight of this still somehow beating hollowed heart. If you listen closely you can hear her whisper, “it was you it was you it was you…”

Pt. 5 It Was All a Dream

I dreamt Covid was over, or maybe we were in pre-Covid times. You wrote me a letter and a package showed up a short time later with your luggage filled with t-shirts. I could feel the weight of them in my hands and smell you on them. Later I was at The Roxy in ATL, the only indoor venue you and I had ever been to. I was sitting on the railing leading into the standing room area perched with my phone in my hand pressed against the top of my thigh. It vibrate against my palm and your name flashed across the screen. I didn’t say anything, but clearly heard you say, “I’m here.” I walked through the double doors of the venue and faced where Sushi Rock and Roll used to be only to see the area just outside of customs at Hartsfield. You were walking towards me in your dress blues.

And then I woke up.

Happy Anniversary

15

We would have been married 15 years this year.

I still have to stop myself from deleting your image from photo albums, erasing your existence from our records, because the husband and father we thought you were is not synonymous with who you are now.

The person smiling back at us beyond the pages of these albums was who we desperately wanted and needed you to be.

You made it so clear that you were never truly that person and it killed you to be him. You made us, the kids and I, attempted murderers. We were the ones who failed you. We were the ones who asked too much when to us it felt like the bare minimum.

The woman I always was had to be stitched tightly under my heart, closed her off beneath my breastbone. I tucked her away, dimmed her light always in hopes your light could shine… as an EMT, firefighter, veteran, artist, father, father, father, father, best friend, spouse… every time your mask fell away, the door would shut the outside world out and we would be trapped with the person you say you truly are now. 

17 years ago, I sat behind the wheel of my car in the early morning summer hours as the sun shrugged the clouds and pines off her shoulders. I sat there crying and writing to myself how I deserved someone who appreciated the things I loved too. How inviting you to join me in fellowship at the monastery for morning meditation would mean the world to me and you rolled over when I tried to wake you… saying you weren’t in the mood. You didn’t care. You slept spread out in my bed, in my loft, with zero remorse towards my distress of leaving that person I was behind… for you. I recall cleaning out my car to find that notebook and reading those words, cheeks stinging with what I thought at the time was shame and now knowing 17 years later, wasn’t shame for my raw honesty with myself but shame for ignoring my own cries for help.