Ok. Now that that's over with, I can move on. So to speak.
I spoke briefly with Ian the other night about some of the more grizly thoughts I've been having recently. I said that I was feeling embarrassed and angry about still harboring feelings and thought about Denali. It's like at one point you have some kind of relationship, where two people are involved, and then there is another point where it's just you alone. That's the weird point where you look around and realize that you are really on your own. Despite my seeing her only a handful of times in the past year, I still feel as if there is an "us," when in fact there isn't anymore. I still think about her daily. I am still trying to figure out how to make things work.
But trying to make real that she is gone? That is the hardest part. That she doesn't care anymore. It's just me. I'm the one standing here trying to figure out how to tend the garden that's already dead and salted. I feel stupid. I feel angry. Stupid because it couldn't be clearer, and angry because I failed to figure out how to avoid this.
I used to feel that I knew something about how to navigate this terrain. But I am finding it excruciatingly difficult to force myself to see that I'm lost. I feel like I don't know who to be without her. Or at least the "her" that I imagined. As time passes she becomes more and more fantasial. What did she smell like? What did we argue about? What did her snoring sound like? Who is the person I am mourning?
As she fades, so do I. I actually see a light at the end of the tunnel, a person I will be without her, and I seem to refuse to go towards it. I hear the train whistle echo off the Berkeley hills and I feel the brush of her in my stomach. I see her blood stain on my old matress and hear her muted cry. She speaks to me from countless restaurants and street corners all over the bay area. I see her in my bathroom and my kitchen and in photos I refuse to delete or move, and I refuse to let go.
It's just me, though. Do you see how stupid and bizarre it is to mourn a phantom? To feel horror and misery in missing your third arm - the one that never existed? It's preposterous, and yet I persist in maintaining it each day and night. Stupid, stupid me.
Posted by Matt at June 19, 2003 01:47 AM