This kind of thing is so easy for me to write. I could do this for days, but I really don't feel it's a reflection of my best work.
How We Fell Apart and What Was Left Behind
1.
Are you awake and listening? So much of what I say goes unheard and I want to be sure you're awake and listening. The time I cried for two days, cried while I was vacuuming, cried while sending out grad school applications, crying while making overly ambitious dinners using ingredients I couldn't afford, no one listened to me. My family had heard it all before and you had never bothered to listen at all.
My stepmother told me that some lessons are unteachable. That somethings you have to walk through to understand what walking through feels like, to arrive at the destination to understand what the destination feels like.
I know what my destination is. The destination is inside the envelope that holds announcements of my student debt, it is the wall side of my bed that I press my body towards (these days, my body is interested only in solidity), it is the dryness and the emptiness of the bottom of my coffee cup and also the realization that I can't afford more. It is also called absence, also independence.
Listen, alright? I am going to give you directions to the place I have arrived. Pay attention. Don't follow me.
2.
If I could turn back the clock I would let you escape the bad fortune of ever knowing me.
- Emmeline, 12/27/2008
3.
Don't go.
-Emmeline, 12/29/2008
4.
And I dragged you out into the carless street because the shower didn't work and it was raining and the overdoses on TV were always wet, thrashing. You were very still. I brought you out into the rain because I wanted you to live and you were intent on dying in my arms, you always told me you played Romeo in your high school production and now I believe you. If you had been conscious enough (and I doubt you were conscious enough, you were never conscious of how I made myself smaller to make room for you, or how I trailed after you, picking up the tab [you did notice that I always had store brand peanut butter but no jelly in my cabinets and complained mightily]), but between the sodium yellow street light bathing you in a kind of golden midsummer glamour, and the way your bones that were doing a terrible job of holding you together looked like cathedral spires, between your stillness like a saint and the blue of your lips like Alki Beach the first time you kissed my neck so tenderly and then got shy-
you were awful beautiful that night.
I guess you got what you wanted. I held you half upright, your knees getting soaked in the puddles from the rain that fell like a benediction. Everything was very still and very quiet. Each rise of your chest was the world to me. I don't know how long I held you in the raid, Emmeline, because you were then living solely on my attention, and I could never deny you that. Each breath you drew was a concession to the fact that you lived your life for an audience of the people you charmed by being reckless and pretty like their dead grandmothers before they got married, and stupid like fireworks are stupid.
Eventually, you woke up. You said you wanted to go back to the party. I followed you in.
5.
How we met:
It was at the wedding of two friends who had had an abortion and then decided to get married. I couldn't decide if this was progressive or regressive of them.
The band was in full swing at the Seattle Observatory Floyd and Georgia had rented, and the year's constellations were scrolling slowly across the ceiling and Emmeline sat right down at my table and demanded to know if I was wearing false eyelashes. Later, I found out that she was the groom's half sister, but at the time, I just thought she was a bitch. I told her I was most certainly not and she said she most certainly did not believe me. She took my face in both hands and demanded that I close my eyes so she could check and when I did she kissed me.
6.
Emmeline was an art history major. I was looking at business and accounting or possibly marketing. There were signs.
7.
I think one of the tragedies of Emmeline is that she carried out her dramatics on such a small stage. In the Puget Sound, in November, you are less a god of the late nights, with blue fingernails bitten short and tally marks caked on your wrist, then someone's drunken aunt just ten years off from decay.
Maybe if she had gotten herself to a big city, where it didn't rain so much. Maybe LA. New York. I feel like she could've been one of those people that you read about on blogs, not so much for their talent, but for that one old fashioned thing they hung on to, charisma. Even a different time would've been better. I can picture her in the Washington Square Park with the Fitzgeralds, Zelda would've loved her, loved the mouth on her. And they would've gotten drunk off the strawberries in the champagne and gossiped about all the pretty people and Emmeline could've curled up between the two most sensational people of the decade and fallen asleep with her feet hooked around their ankles.
Instead, I watched her look at the lamps I bought from IKEA mild distaste. She didn't like that we lived close to a grocery store. She hated orca whales, and whale watching tours and didn't give a shit about the salmon run. When our lovely, private, liberal arts college put on readings, I sometimes thought that she choose those times to be strategic about her bad life decisions, stumbling shouting through the neatly arranged folding chairs, getting sick on the lecturer's notes. She was maybe a little pleased at my mortification, and definitely pleased when I took her home, gave her a warm shower, fed her tea, tucked her into bed. She liked to hook her feet around my ankles as she fell asleep.
8.
If she doesn't make you nervous, you should be nervous.
-Surprisingly good advice from Emmeline's old roommate, who I later found out was also her dealer
9.
One of the things that kept my heartstrings fully wrapped around her wrist was her early morning behavior. She was never a good sleeper and would do her best through the night to entwine her body around mine. In the mornings, I would wake up before her and if I didn't have class till later, I would let her rest her head on my chest and tell me about her dreams. Her sleepy warmth was almost as good as the feeling that she needed me to listen. There were stinging jellyfish, and elephants, and her father, and they kept trying to get her. I would protect her, right?
I wish I could've protected her.
10.
She had us kiss in the front pew of every church in Seattle.
Her childhood nickname was Ducky.
She was catholically attractive. Gay men, grandmothers, sorority sisters, middle manager types, small children, - all at one time or another I caught scoping out her sweet high ass.
She could catch bumblebees and never be stung.
She had perfect white, straight teeth. She would never admit to anything so suburban as braces.
No matter where she woke up, she always flossed.
She had a habit of sitting in my lap when she wanted to talk to me about the cafeteria's lack of vegan options or cats and it was very endearing.
11.
"And here's what we're going to do, okay? Are you listening? Okay, you've got those AP credentials, so you can graduate early. And I've can take online classes. I've been looking into it. We can take your car and drive to Colorado. You don't know anyone in Colorado, right? I don't either and I think it will be good. And we can go get a cabin in the mountains and you can tell people how to spend their money and I can paint. We'll grow squash and cucumbers and not get a phone so I can't talk to anyone from the city, which I also think will be good. You can get one of those dumb happy dogs that are just like you. And we can be happy, okay? We'll be so fucking happy they won't know what to do with us."
-Emmeline, 3/12/2009
12.
Her parents did a terrible job with her.
13.
Sometime after we got the apartment together spring semester, I realized that you had an awful lot of friends. Well, visitors. They were all skinny like runway models from Russia or the girls with eating disorders in my high school and none of them seemed able to control their volume I'd hear you with them in the living room, snort laughing over nothing and then I'd catch a shouted AND WE DON'T KNOW WHERE SHE IS or THE HOSPITAL, IT CLOSES AT or BUBBLES, YOU'VE GOT TO GET THE BUBBLES OUT, or FUCK ALL OF THIS I DON'T NEED THIS SHIT, I'M GOING HOME, but I always woke up to them on our couch. I worried to you that they didn't have homes. You assured me they did, but maybe not in the same kind of way I was thinking.
Every time they'd leave, you'd pad into the kitchen where I would be doing my financial accounting homework and demand kisses from me and ask what was for dinner. I would boil you some dollar store pasta and we wouldn't ask hard questions.
14.
She was beautiful and she knew it.
She had decided she was more beautiful than I was and was not afraid to let me know.
She was not afraid of things she should have been afraid of.
She was exhausting. I woke up worrying about her, went to class worrying about her, came back to the apartment, took care of her and fell asleep worrying that I wasn't doing enough.
She had a chest piece that said The Struggle Still Feels Beautiful, which should have been a tipoff right there.
Sometimes, most times, she wanted a sycophant, not a girlfriend. She wanted someone to keep track of her during her stumbling back alley nights and to admire how pretty she looked with the sweat making her bangs stick to her forehead the morning after.
15.
Things I Should Have Been Doing with My Life Instead (a short list)
- Getting a real job instead of doing the spreadsheets at my dad's office all the time
- Actually applying to grad school, not just looking at their websites with the amount of guilt that regular people associate with internet porn
- Gotten a cat
- My stepmother thinks I should've waxed my eyebrows or not gotten my hair cut by the little boy's barber. This one's open for debate.
- Spent less time in craigslist looking for the right job for Emmeline, that involved flexible hours, medical and dental, art and no assholes.
- Made friends.
- Made friends that weren't Emmeline's friends
- Made friends who actually cared about things like the economy and voting and which grocery stores had the cheapest yogurt.
- Slept
- Worried about myself. Fed myself.
- Gotten a girlfriend who didn't wake me up crying into a pillow on the far corner of the bed, curled into the smallest ball possible, who would never tell me why, or who, or when
16.
I have never forgiven her for the morning she woke up and cuddled closer and said, "You'll do for now", before she was fully awake.
17.
I would be lying to say I don't miss you. I miss you in the same way a dog misses its collar. I have a lot of dreams about her. I never used to dream before.
I would dream that I was walking through a city with bridges that we built together and a river that we had both named Safety. I am always looking for you. You have left me with this terrible city that is now my responsibility and I want you. The streets are made of cobblestone, which in the dream reminds me that we had argued over making the streets cobblestone or brick and you had won out. The city smells like your neck after I brought you in from the rain during the party. Sometimes I see the heel of your favorite pair of shoes as I turn the corner, but I never catch up.
