To My Other,
I hope this reaches you well.
I’m quite certain it won’t. Of course, I’m really writing this to you for me.
I’m sorry it’s been so long. It’s typically much easier to pretend that I don’t want to pretend
you’re still here. As time has passed, I’ve gotten better at it—at convincing myself I’m ok,
at missing you without the feeling. They say grieving gets easier.
It doesn’t really. You just sort of give up—you stop trying to make sense of everything, you stop
hoping that things will ever quite feel right again, and you start feeling less in general.
I’ve become a lot tougher now, calloused over with a sort of apathetic crust.
Admittedly, I don’t know if you would even really like this version of me.
I often don’t recognize myself. But without you, I can never be that person I was,
again. More than a piece of me died with you; it was a whole version.
I often find it hard to understand the feeling of missing you when I don’t really know where you
went. Where did you go? Everything you were, all the character traits, the feelings and beliefs,
the thoughts, the ideas, the potential, the collection of cells and atoms that built into
the expression of a warm, youthful, enthusiastic self, they’ve changed into something else now, the
particles now spreading out and dispersing across time and space elsewhere, never to be you again.
The clocks don’t turn back. I’ve tried. Time only goes one way, through age, through apathy,
through death. I knew that before, but I hadn’t really felt it. Now I know it and feel it. That
must be what it means to truly know the truth of something. It’s more than knowledge; it’s
more than sense; it’s the intersection of both. And as they say, the truth hurts. I always hated
that saying. But I get it now. We must be the only living things that desire truth even though the
truth almost always reveals itself to go against what we desire. We are masochists in denial.
I know you would want me to be happy—to go on about life as if nothing changed
and everything was still the same. But everything changed and nothing is the same. And you nor I can
change that. You couldn’t have and can’t know now what it is like to live in a world without you.
You couldn’t have accurately predicted or imagined it. And you can’t be here now
to know or convince me otherwise. Only I can know what it’s like. And let me assure you,
it is a hard time indeed. You would be how I am. I guarantee it. That’s how it works.
I still have so much I want to experience and see and talk about with you.
All the adventures that will never be, all the excitement and sensations I will never feel.
You are the child in me I can never return to. You made simple, little things exciting and fun.
I can do mostly all the same stuff still, but I don’t. Not really. I mean I do sometimes,
but it doesn’t really feel like the same stuff. You made life scary and unclear,
but it felt real. Now, life is quieter, simpler, and more stable, and it feels like very little.
The debt I currently pay in grief and apathy
is perhaps the price of the potency of the life I lived with you.
You aren’t truly dead yet. Sometimes I feel you, I see you. You poke out from the mundanity when
I see the sky’s blueness extra vividly, when I feel momentarily inspired to try something or
go somewhere different, when things feel light and new. I will, at the very least, continue to carry
your memories and these momentary appearances for as long as I can. And as long as I can,
in the same way a version of me died with you, a version of you will remain alive with me.
You’re the one who died. And yet I am the one who must try to live
again. I am the remains of life that you have left behind in your wake.
And now your remains are what I must hold onto in order to feel alive. As often as I can,
even if just for a fleeting moment, that is what I will do. And that will have to be enough.