Feb 01 2009
The PICTURE
The last time I spoke to you was right before Christmas. I guess it’s not surprising, the way I get sentimental about us right before Christmas. I wrote you an email, I asked for you to please agree to see me.
Things ended so horribly in July. We were so happy, in sunlight and bloom and your new apartment and my new place as well. We were so wonderful until reality and doctors and families set in.
It all really sunk in very fast, and you asked me not to hang up the phone, but I had to. Your voice is so beautiful in the mornings when we’re lying next to each other, but it’s entirely different when I’m upsetting you on the phone.
But Christmas, yes, you did respond back. And it was so typical. Your hesitancy. Your feeling for ambiguity, your need to break clean of me. I don’t know why we can’t do this cleanly.
“I don’t know about this.”
Why, why, of course we fucking know why. But it means very little around Christmas, or any of the thousands of nights we think for each other, and if just for one moment, we put our addictions aside and we were just honey and chocolate and pillows.
So that night, a series of regretful words and hurtful memories, I did cry. I tore down the pictures around my room, just to be free of the claustrophobia. To feel something other than the stress we have carried around for four years.
That’s my number. You use it against me. I always said it and now you,
“Samantha, it’s been four years, I can’t do this anymore.”
I found our picture, and it was so very sweet. And I was so happy, in the picture at least. We looked so very right next to each other, with arms and teeth and smiles and wisteria, hysteria.
Before I left Ithaca, I made sure I didn’t bring the picture home. Enough sentiment in and of itself, you being two hours down the road. And it being Christmas.
I found the picture that night when I reached for our favorite short story book, to calm down, pictures all violently sprawled on the floor, and your face hardly anywhere in my sight –
That picture fell to the floor in the clutter. All that clutter. Like when he took the knife to his chest, and we cried for hours about the horror of human nature, and the absolute agony of ending a life.
Did he need to do it? Did we have to do the same thing? Clutter on the floor, and pictures of sadly poignant memories.
I cannot find the picture today. I’ve been looking for it, and your smile still isn’t here. Or on the wall. Or anywhere.
You like the clutter too, but I’m not sure if it means the same. Me coming over with a bottle of wine to celebrate the new home and bed, and you having made your own collage on the wall. Pictures of us, and of prom, and notes. I cannot believe all the things you have kept over the years.
Most of mine I threw out. Except that picture.
—And there is so much of this I just wanted to tell you tonight. It just felt good to tell somebody.
