Pt 1: Death and Heart Medicine

I wonder, at the end of my life, if I will lie in my hospital bed, wanting only a hand to hold for the short rest of my life. I hope when I am old and dying, I can hold the hand of a young girl and ask her about her young life, remembering a time when I used to feel as lost as she feels now. I hope I can look at her and smile and know that she will figure it out and that soon, she will understand God’s will for her life.  

I keep wondering if I will ever see you again, who we will be and what we will say to each other, if anything. Maybe I will have a ring on my finger or maybe I’ll have gotten a tattoo, maybe your hair will be gray or one of us will be holding a sleeping child.

And I wonder how you do this to people. I wonder how you could have made me feel, for the briefest of moments, that I was alright, I wasn’t so broken after all, and I could do this again. You could have at least shown me some decency by telling me why it ended, or at least when you decided it was over. How hard would it have been, just to answer me one more time? Did you know you would do this all along? When you told me you wouldn’t just disappear, when you told me you’d let me know if you changed your mind? Did you say that just to make me drop it, all the while planning to just drop off the face of the earth when it wasn’t fun anymore, leaving me to wonder forever what happened, what happened inside your head, just a day after I thought it was going so well?

I wish I hadn’t told my friends about the date that never happened. About our long phone calls when I thought you were doing so much better and things had changed. I wish I hadn’t told anyone anything, and that there were no pictures to have to delete, and that instead of a big, “what went wrong?” you were just a small, “what if.”

I wish I could just forget all about you, forget everything I know about you, everything we did together and the way you made me feel. I like to slam doors closed when it’s over, lock them up and pile things in front to make sure I never try to open it again (it’s not like you’re going to, but I might). Something is in the way this time, and I am pushing it closed with all my might, but I can’t get it to latch because you show up in my dreams. You are the first thing on my mind when I wake up in the morning, and for a moment I am thinking I will have a text from you and everything is better. But then I brush my teeth and splash water in my face, remembering it was just a dream, just a mirage, and I won’t see your name on my phone anymore.

Your smile was like heart medicine that I didn’t want to take. I hadn’t felt that way in such a long time, and I worried you were softening me somehow. I was afraid to see you because I knew it would affect me, so I fought and I fought until, for some reason, I stopped fighting. And the medicine didn’t taste bad at all, it was sweet as honey, and it somehow did make me feel better, like my heart was melting just enough to fill the cracks from the past, but not spill over. And I guess I got addicted, and maybe that is what stands in the way of slamming this stupid door closed, deleting the pictures and all the notes in my phone about you, blocking your number and deleting the playlist. I got addicted to some heart medicine, the smile that took up your whole face, and I’d give anything to see you look at me like that one more time.

Like indecision to call you,

the medicine sits on the counter, untouched, for now.

You reminded me why I used to do this in the first place. So many times, I've met someone at a bad time for me. So many times— meaning every single other time— something was wrong, the timing was wrong. Every time before, I've thought, "if only we had met before..." And this time, a few weeks after meeting you, I stood in the shower thinking about you and I realized that this was the first time I met someone when I was actually myself, I was finally ready for this, and I could do this again.

Then you reminded me of a night I often wish I could forget, at least the second half of it. The night I danced on my own and felt safe with two of my best friends in the whole world, drinking away my fears that I would be angry at the wedding we had to go to tomorrow. I had so much fun and I thought it would all be ok, but it all came crashing down as we headed back to the hotel and I had to remember what we were doing here, that there was a wedding tomorrow. I was sobbing in the streets the whole way back, my friends carrying me up the hill to the hotel, as I cried "I don't want to do this again," over and over and over and over again, and the people in the streets stared at us while I cried harder than I ever have. But the next day came, and I was okay, and the wedding gave me hope for the future, two of my favorite people marrying each other in the Catholic church, starting the life of their dreams.

All those stupid songs that talk about wanting the night to last forever, or looking at someone and forgetting the rest of the world around us, that happened with you. I wished the nights would never end, I wished I could stay there and look at you under the stars all night, and hear you say “just one more” and lean in towards me one more time. It felt like a night like this had never happened before, that I’d never before wished for an endless night, and that it would never happen again with anyone else, even though I think it must have happened before, and it must happen again. But right now, all I remember is you, under the stars like glitter in the air, you looking at me, forgetting the people on the lawn right beside us, wanting only to hear more about you, no matter what you wanted to talk about, even if it was golf. And now I sit and wonder if I might never see you again.

And I must admit, it happened once. Someone I had wondered about long ago showed up in my life again.

I’d met him when I was as broken as I’ve ever been. I was working on myself and had sworn off men until I could get my shit together. But we became fast friends somehow, but I don’t remember now. I told him before ever hanging out that we were strictly friends, I needed a year or more to defrost from the past, and he understood (so he said) and we hung out as “just friends.”

I don’t remember now how long we remained friends, I don’t remember if it was weeks or months, but at the time, it felt like a long time, and now, it feels like no time at all. In the end, he hurt my feelings by telling me that girls and guys cannot just be friends, and that we couldn’t be friends anymore. It hurt my feelings simply because I was being selfish—I liked him and I knew he liked me, and I kept spending time with him without the intention of us going anywhere. I’m wiser now, but at the time I was hurt, and for a while I wondered about if only we had met some other time in life, especially thinking if we had only met before, maybe it would have worked out. And I wondered if I would see him again someday, and who we would be, and what we would say to each other, and if we would maybe try it then.

After about two years, I was at a track meet standing around with some of my teammates, and it wasn’t until he was about two feet from me, saying, “hi Anna,” that I even saw him at all. He said something about being in the area, and he might’ve said he had “sort of wondered” if I was still on the team. I stood there, staring at him, and I must have eventually said something (right??), but all I could think was,

 “he told me we are not friends.”

We are not friends.

It was clear that he thought I would say something along the lines of, “it’s nice to see you again,” but I had no such thing to say to him, and it was also clear that this surprised him. Finally, he walked away, and my heart was pounding as I stood staring after him, because for the life of me, I could not think of his name.

Still I wonder, will I run into you in some bar in a foreign country, or a gas station a few miles from home? Will I see you there, across the street, will I cross to say hello, or will I quickly walk away, hoping you haven’t seen me yet? Will I stand there trying to remember your name, remembering only a little bit of hurt that still remains? Will you say sorry, will I be happy to see you? Will we try again?

The medicine on the counter taunts me and I wonder if I will call you, one day when I’ve had too much to drink and I’m a little too sad and I heard the wrong song, and it reminded me of you, and I won’t resist it anymore— I will call. I wonder if I will sit in a karaoke bar, having fun with new or with old people, until someone is singing I Miss You, but it isn’t you, and you don’t miss me, and I won’t be having fun anymore. I will sit at the table wondering about you again, wondering if I should call. I think about it, every day, but in my right mind I know that medicine is probably rancid by now, and it will not taste good, and it would just be embarrassing to contact you again. Sometimes I open the bottle and I’m about to click your number or hit send, but I come to my senses and know that it will only make me sick now. And the smell of the medicine reminds me of how different the beginning was from the end, and I wonder if maybe it is like when the blurry picture finally loads and you thought it was good but then it wasn’t— from far away I looked beautiful but the closer you got the more you realized I wasn’t what you wanted at all, because I am not the shiny thing I seem like on the outside, I am old and battered, dirty and used and tired from the journey, and I don’t think my heart can take much more of this.

I wish I could be like one of those quiet and mysterious girls, the ones you don’t notice at first but eventually you realize they are the most glamorous thing in the room. I wish I wasn’t the one that people always notice first, but tire of quickly and move on to the next.

I wonder if I will lay on my deathbed, slowly withering away, and see my great-granddaughter, who is now an adult. If I do, I will ask her if she is going to meet her boyfriend for dinner when she leaves, and I will recognize the twinge of sadness deep in her eyes when she says she Doesn’t Have One, and I’ll remember those words, always on her tongue, because she has to say them so often. I wonder if she will understand that when old people say, “you will figure it out,” or “it will happen for you, don’t worry,” they don’t just say this to make someone feel better, they say it because they know that it is true. The girl in the chair holding my hand will look out the window as I sleep, and think about how silly it sounds when someone says they hope their ex will find love again. “Of course they will find love again,” she thinks. There is no doubt in her mind that someone will love him again as well, or better than she loved him. She hopes the next girl is more compatible, and their goals line up better, but mostly she only hopes he will love the next girl better. But she will know, without a doubt, that someone will surely love him wholeheartedly. With the same surety, the elderly know that God’s will will become abundantly clear in time, and this confusing part of life will seem like no time at all.

And however much I wish I could just erase the past, I know that if the time comes where I am forced to remember you, I will probably remember the hurt. I will stand there wondering what happened, still wondering if it was my fault or yours, and I will blankly stare at you, trying to decide if it is nice to see you again or not. I wonder if you will look at me and remember how fearless you were at the beginning, or if you will remember the coward you were at the end. I wonder if you will think “I used to like her,” or if you will think, “she was a fool.” I wonder if I will say, “I’m sorry that I brought him up,” even though it surely will not matter then. But I am sorry that I brought him up, because I said all the wrong things, and I did it only because I wanted you to know you meant more to me than anyone else. I only thought of him at all because you were healing some small hurt inside of me that he had left there. Some small hurt I had grown so used to feeling that I forgot it even hurt anymore. But I know you didn’t see what was between the lines, how could you have? Between the lines was the important part— the things I said out loud to you didn’t actually matter at all. I wasn’t just impressed that your eyes didn’t water and that you didn’t complain, even though that’s what I said out loud. What mattered was that I asked if I could do your eyebrows and you said yes. You trusted me. You just let me do it. I didn’t mean to compare you with someone else. I didn’t mean to, but I did, because when you said yes to me I remembered the part of the story I always try to forget because it’s the part that hurts. The part of the story I’d like to forget, because when I asked him, he said no. And then when he got an opinion from some other girl, some girl he wasn’t dating, that was when he changed his mind and let me do it. So I was impressed that you trusted me from the start, and even though it was with something small and unimportant, it really meant something to me.

I wonder if the reason I cannot close the door is not because of my dreams at all, but because I don’t want to accept that you are just somebody that I used to know. I don’t want to accept that the heart medicine empty on the counter was not medicine at all, it was just a placebo sold to a fool by the same scheme everyone says not to fall for. I don’t want to accept that it was stupid, that my urge to fight it was right after all, that you were a fraud and I’m just a hopeless romantic, thinking one day someone will actually be as genuine as I thought you were. So I wonder if you ever look at my last text to you (you don’t), wondering if it’s too late to respond to me (it isn’t). I wonder if you’ll always be one of those people who I think of and feel just a little bit sad, wondering if it could’ve been, should’ve been all worked out. No one’s arm around me has ever felt comfortable, even when it’s been someone I loved dearly. I wonder how it was that in the backseat of that van, for the first time in my life, your arm felt nice wrapped around my shoulder. Mainly, I wonder if I had just picked up the phone, that one day that you called and I couldn’t answer…what would you have said? Would I have closure now, if only I had been able to answer the phone that day?

I don’t understand how you could make me feel so much and just vanish from my life like you were never even there to begin with. Is it hard for you, to do this to people? Do you even think of me?

I wonder how you could say that you liked me when you couldn’t even make up some excuse to give me closure, couldn’t just tell me SOMETHING so I could slam the door shut behind you. I wonder why I deleted your name in my phone when I still remember the number, and your birthday, and all the things about you that I wrote down in fear of forgetting the important things about you. I wonder why I keep fighting God’s will, keep holding on for dear life to a rope that isn’t even a thread anymore. 

And I made a playlist of songs that remind me of you, standard practice for breakups, but you and I never even dated. It’s a way to compartmentalize, to set the things aside that remind me of you, an artificial box that I will never open or look at, but it is there just to throw things in when I think of you. A playlist I will never click on. It’s a way to say, “this chapter is over,” even though I can’t close the book.

And I can sit here and act like you are a villain, like you lied to me or used me, that I was just convenient, but I know it isn’t true. You are not a villain, but you are not my hero either, and I don’t really know what you were at all. I could tell you were afraid of something, so afraid, and I guess I will never know what it is you are afraid of. But I do know how you smiled at me, how you offered your jacket, how you always made sure I was the first to be taken care of at a restaurant, I remember how you liked, no, loved my smile, and that compliment meant so much more because you corrected yourself in the middle to say that you actually loved it. And I remember the way you told me I am so beauuuutiful, how you said, “I think we’ll see each other again,” and how when I asked if you wanted to go to bed, you said we could stay on the phone a little longer. So I know it must not have all been a lie, because I was there, and and at the beginning you were fearless and I was afraid, and then I was fearless and you were afraid, or maybe you just didn’t like me anymore, I’ll never be sure. Something was incongruent with us and there is nothing I could do about it, no way to show you you could trust me and that I believe in you. It's much easier to try to slam this stubborn door shut when I am telling myself you must not have liked me at all, which is why I wish I could just forget the way you looked at me. Remembering how you treated me is the worst part, because no one ever treated me that way before, and I don't know what I did wrong to make you run away. I hope you meet your goals. I hope you get out. I hope you learn to believe in someone, and let someone love you. Mostly, I hope you don't do this again. Because it wasn’t that you moved on or changed your mind, it was that you completely abandoned me.

And I know the medicine on the counter isn't bad, it isn’t rancid, and it wasn’t a placebo either, but it was never medicine at all, just something that used to taste sweet until I had too much too fast and it made me sick. It still looks good sometimes, when I am starving, but I know it will leave a bad taste in my mouth or make me sick again, so I look at the message I had typed and I delete it, turn off my phone and go to bed.

One day I will forget everyone and everything, and I will lie in my hospital bed, waiting for death.  Someone will be sitting beside me, holding my hand as I rest, and I will wake up and see a beautiful young girl there, not knowing who she is. I will be startled, but happy, and say “you are so beautiful,” and someone else beside me, a young man, will say, “that is your great-granddaughter.” And I will say, “oh! She is so beautiful!” and I will fall back asleep as I say “thank the Lord in Heaven for all of my blessings on earth.” And that girl will start to cry, not because I forgot who she was, but because all this time, I really did think she was So. Beautiful. And maybe the girl beside me will remember it forever until it is her turn to lie in a hospital bed, and all of the forgotten people will not matter anymore because she has so many blessings on earth given to her by our Lord in heaven.

And I wonder if you will read this, and think I am crazy.

Probably.

But it doesn’t matter, so I wrote it anyway.  

“The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you’re never going to see again.

...Telling yourself that something does not matter is one of the loneliest things you can do, because you only say it, of course, about things that matter very much. But often, and this is the lonely part, they only matter to you.” - Lemony Snicket

so maybe this is me shutting the door, because I said some of the things that I wanted to say (the rest are to stay on actual paper), or maybe I will find the necklace that I wore for years that somehow I misplaced or lost, and maybe he will lead you back to me.