To the parent, friend, or lover. To you or to me. To the one who left when they said they never would.
You're dead. You have been for a long time.
The thing is, you're still breathing and your heart is beating.
You aren't dead.
You're so alive that it makes me wonder if maybe I have died instead. Someone wise once said something that goes, "the hardest thing you will have to do is grieve the loss of someone who is still alive." That's the truth if I've ever heard it.
You're gone but I know you're out there existing a perfectly good life in a perfectly wonderful world that doesn't include me. You are dead, but I have never seen someone so alive. Your eyes probably still light up the same, as if you have forgotten about me completely. Maybe you have, but I think I might be okay with that. It is easier that way.
If you really died, I would've worn black to your funeral, to mourn the loss of someone I loved so deeply. It's appropriate to wear black. Everyone always wears black and sits around sobbing. Except maybe I would've worn yellow, since it was your favorite color after all. Like sunshine, bumble bees, and scrambled eggs on a Sunday morning. I would have lit up that whole damn funeral in my pretty yellow dress but you wouldn't have been there to see it. Everyone would be doing their share of crying, because that's what a perfectly flawed human you were, but you're still alive and the only one left to mourn you is me. There was no funeral because you aren't dead, but you left me like maybe you were.
Now whenever I hear a siren out the window on a cold night my heart skips a beat and I wonder if it's you.
When the phone rings and I pick it up to silence, I hope it's you on the other end.
And you used to scold me for never wearing sunblock but I haven't burned a summer day since then. It's my record of Wish You Were Here playing on repeat. How I wish, how I wish you were here. It's a 5 minute and 36 second song with only three verses, but somehow it keeps playing over and over again as my head sinks into the pillow and I think oh how I wish you were here.
I never knew true sadness until I was weeping in the bathtub and was unsure if it was the spout water that filled the basin or my tears
and
I never knew true loneliness until I was boarding the plane and turned to wave goodbye but you had already walked away
and
I never knew true fear until you were across the room from me holding the bottle of prescription pills and I couldn't reach you fast enough
and before I graduated high school I would wander the empty hallways searching for your laugh or a misplaced memory until I forgot why I was wandering at all.
It's when I was showering and the water was so scorching that it burned my skin, but I didn't realize until I looked at myself in the mirror and saw red splotches painted across my body. That letter I sent that came back stamped "return to sender" still haunts me when I sleep.
We went chasing pavements but found the place where the sidewalk ends and I fell off.
I saw the cigarette dangling from your fingertips and I wanted to reach out and cinch the flame but knew I would burn myself trying to save you.
It's the doctor saying I know this will hurt before injecting me with a needle, but feeling no pain at all. When I got my wisdom teeth out and they told me to count down from ten, but I got lost by seven.
You are the abstract paintings at the museums that everyone looks at and pretends to understand. You remind me of Psalm 147:4; counting the stars and calling them all by name as if you rule the universe and sprinkled the stars across the black sky yourself.
And I hope your heart is as full as you made me empty.
It was the muttered words, clenched teeth, and white knuckles that told me you had died. I had known for awhile that you were gone, but I didn't want to hear it. If I had to hear it, then I would know it was real. And I don't know exactly when the goodnight changed to goodbye but since then you've been dead, and I decided that if I had to be haunted by a ghost I'm glad it's you.
And it's never the people who die who are in pain, but the ones who are left behind.
That's for everyone who left when you needed them the most. Now you know you never needed them at all.
Until next time xxx.
