The Staircase and the Wedding.
I wrote the below piece 8 years ago.
It’s no literary masterpiece, it is just feelings trying to be made sense of. And it seemed as good a piece as any to begin posting with.
I suppose I was speaking into my notes app as I had no living person to share these thoughts with, all mutual friends busy with their own grief and lives.
I think it might be the first note in my phone that I wrote on the subject of losing my sweet, soft, big hearted ex boyfriend and friend. Written 3 years after his untimely death. Was I in shock that whole time? It certainly seems that way, looking back.
I couldn’t even write those words for many years ‘his death’.
I couldn’t face those words as they were too harsh. Too true.
It’s been eleven years now and I don’t cry for him as often. This progress can sometimes feel heartless, as though I’m forgetting. A certain couple of songs still hit me like a tonne of bricks if I’m driving and deep in my subconscious.
I made a playlist of these songs. I’m not sure why, perhaps to desensitise? To Process, to dwell.
To remember.
I’ve never been afraid to swim in my big feelings. In fact I often feel most comfortable there, at times losing myself to them and having to work hard to extricate myself and remember to live.
I was at a friend’s wedding the night he died. Tipsy on wine and being silly for photos.
I can’t look at those photos now. I can’t help but wonder if it was that moment, or that moment…
Every year that my friends celebrated their wedding it felt like a crushing blow to my heart. They counted the years of their love as I counted the years of the worst loss I had ever felt. I of course never told them this. They didn’t know him and there was a bittersweet, if jarring, comparison to be made between love and loss. Of lifelong promises and permanent silence.
The losses we struggle with the most are often the ones we loved the hardest.
Especially when you don’t see it coming. Especially when they are so young.
In the last message he ever sent to me he said “I’m just glad to be alive!” Only months later I would learn that he no longer was.
And I hadn’t replied.
I think it took me years to make peace with this fact. I still don’t know that I have, but I’ve learned to live with it in the way that you have to in order to carry on.
Oh I had my reasons, of course I did. It wasn’t a random act of cruelty and nothing is ever as black and white as we wish it could be. But to give those reasons now feels hollow, an excuse and I don’t think I want to be excused, knowing what happened after.
We were quarrelling, it was a part of our pattern that had followed us into our 30s. Break ups, make ups, friends into lovers into friends and back again, a hundred times over. Feeling like adults in our late teens and early 20’s but still very much naive. Our friends and family were exhausted by our toing and froing.
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It wasn’t by any means perfect, although many moments between us felt like it. We were both grasping for something we didn’t quite have the vocabulary to ask for and yet, many times, we didn’t need it. Our lust for one another transcending all words. Discovering sex like it was the first time.
We wanted it to be perfect, two romantics with an idealised version of what love should look like and little life experience with which to base a comparison. We didn’t notice that it couldn’t be. We were too young. Too high, too drunk. On one another and the rest.
He was the one I could never resist and I knew I was the same for him.
Oh it had to end someday, but not like this. I would never have believed it could happen like this.
Perhaps all the words and songs I have written for and about him over the past eleven years have been the reply I didn’t send that day, that week, that month.
Yes, I had my reasons. Boundaries I needed to set.
You can’t be there at every hour of need.
But with the luxury of hindsight now in my hand, I will regret my silence every damn day.
Anyway, for you, A.
2017
I lost you, you just left.
I was drunk when you expired. I knew nothing of the staircase as I sat laughing behind a scarf, taking photos.
I lost my phone that night. Drunkenly I dreamt of you. You said “Goodbye. Let’s be friends.” It made no sense.
They said don’t look at Facebook. I had no phone.
It’s been three years.
I went to see a psychic and sobbed the entire time. She said you meant to do it. She said you told her that and I’m not sure if I hate her for it or not.
You were sad when we last spoke. We always bared our souls to one another, there was no need for us to lie. No point, I knew you inside out.
But I couldn’t be the support you needed. No amount of support could have helped. That’s a fact that tears another rip into my heart every time I try to force myself to believe it.
I’m shaking inside, it’s like vibrations. It makes me feel sick.
I want to go to your Mum’s house. She invited me, you know and I think she meant it. I saw her at the pub, we both cried without mentioning you and it felt like you were there too. Even just thinking of visiting makes the tears flow. And how do I sit in a house I was last in with you?
She doesn’t need a daft ex girlfriend weeping all over her but I don’t know what else to do, where to channel this grief. I am bereft and I don’t know how I’ll ever not feel this way.
3 years.
Fuck.
