Wreckage
I sat down this evening to write something — anything — and I was terrified by what came out.
I ended up writing a letter to an ex. One of those letters you think will fix everything that went wrong, but ends up adding more fractures to an already mangled thing. I realized about a third of the way through just how terrible it was, doing what I was doing, writing those words. But I made myself keep going.
And at the end, right where I would put my name if I were ever stupid enough to send this message, I shattered.
I feel like I’ve left a lot of collateral damage in my wake. I’ve been at this for almost 30 years and I’ve left a trail of burned bridges and broken feelings on my path to get here. Wherever the fuck “here” is. This should be one of those times I look back and judge my progress, but I can’t see it over the smoldering remains of what came before.
How do people deal with their past? Many people drink, I suppose. I knew a girl once — well, not knew, but met — who obsessively analyzed every step she had taken through her writing. I actually respect her for it, because she turned it into what I gather through the whispering webs into a good career. She definitely gets a level of brand recognition. But even now that I think about her, I think about the night in Portland when I rebelled against her and her peers, or the morning after when I declined her invitation for lunch and bought an earlier train ticket.
And, perhaps not surprisingly, about the woman I returned home to.
After a few minutes of weeping, I struggled to my feet and poured myself a glass of Jameson’s whiskey and sent a text to melovecoffee. At the time, I didn’t know why. And right before she called, it hit me: I needed to hear her voice to ground myself, to keep myself from calling the ex and making things, quite honestly, worse. I needed to know the future was there, waiting for me, to keep me away from revisiting the past.
And suddenly I felt even worse than before.
She told me I shouldn’t. And I fear she’ll read this and feel… something. Jealousy? Anger? I don’t even know.
I hope she feels reassured, in the same way I felt when I heard her voice, even across 3,000 miles of poorly-made cell phone towers, relaying the tear-soaked strains of my voice across the middle of America to her ear, bringing the soothing softness in her words back to me in broken intervals. She can’t understand the debt I owe her — already — for waiting patiently through static and sadness while I quietly fell apart.
This wreckage is still there, the smoke drifting up toward the sky in the background. I could stand and watch it. I could even try to restart the fire, banging stones together and hoping for a spark.
But because she answered the phone and opened her heart, I’ll try to turn around and walk toward the horizon. Toward her.
