New exhaustions
Or an extenuation of one that began last November, around the same time I found a strand of your hair hanging from one of our living room lamps. I didn’t find it, actually, I was thinking about you and Ian found the hair. “Whose hair is this?” I was shaking. “What color is it?” I asked him. He told me. No mistaking it was yours.
By that point we had driven from one side of this massive American land mass to the other and had lived in Georgia for several months. How this hair, now? I wanted to keep it. Wrap it around one of my pens. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Bad enough, isn’t it, that I saved the birthday card you gave me? Bad enough, isn’t it, that I still think about the way you —
Well.
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The day I had today was rife with mini-breakdowns, though all over the same issue and I remained professional — on my game, even — at work. Work is rewarding and emotionally demanding and mentally unpredictable. Work. How the man responsible for much of my current stress would chide me for these adverbs. I want to unfurl strings of adverbs and adjectives all over my paragraphs out of spite. Spiteishly. Today’s weather: perfect? Not an intuitive match for all the crying I had to do, but there we were. Now, of course, it’s cold again, so much colder than I thought the South ever got.
I was hoping we would watch something tonight because my brain is still in shreds from the breakdowns, even though Ian held me and friends were there for me etc. Still that void in my chest that seems like it’s if-anything widened in that span of time between stopping at In-N-Out in the wee hours on the way to Sacramento where we stayed at Ian’s mom’s for one last night in California and she wore the t-shirt she got from Spain, a museum in the town that has your last name and I kept staring at it thinking why did you have to wear that shirt tonight?
What about the moment that another instructor said, “It’s really helpful to have a writing partner,” and no organ in my body was ready for the phrase. Somehow I held the tears back. Somehow I’ve learned to do that. I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you. Remember when we decided that was okay to say?
