My love for you is like always letting in a draft.
I still love you and miss you. It’s died down from an every day thing — from an every hour, every second thing, and I’m glad, because that burned so badly — but I still miss you. Now I just see people and I think they look like you, or I hear someone’s voice or get a glimpse of their smile, and I think, ‘That’s her. That’s just like her,’ or, ‘Is that her? Could it be her?’ Even when I’m not looking for you or thinking about you, some small part of me is. It’s like a dog, that part of me, always looking out the window, just in case you come back.
I still have your picture on my desk. I think about moving it, because all it does is make me sad when I see it, but I can’t. It’s all I have left of you, in a way. It’s brighter in my memories than the memories we had because it’s newer than them now. Magical thinking at its finest — I’m afraid if I move it you’ll go away for real, more than you already have, that I won’t have you in my life anymore at all. I know, i know. It’s not you. It’s just a photo. But it’s the only thing from you I still have.
This time of year I think about you all the time. I figure out what I’d get for you if I still had you in my life, how I’d be sure to send you a Christmas and a birthday gift and not be like all those lazy people who send you one and call it good. I like to think that I still know you well enough to know what you’d like, but honestly I’m not so sure. That maybe I don’t scares me, and hurts me too.
I talk to my therapist about you, about this. She’s very rational about it all. Tells me not to read too much into your silence, so I try not to, because I know it’s nothing I’ve done? And yet the what-ifs crawl in and tell me it must be. If it was me, oh my god, please believe me, whatever it was, I would take it all back. If there was a way I could fix things between us, with time, effort, money, I’d do it. Just talk to me and tell me what needs to be done.
And that’s the shitty thing about silences. It’s so easy to read into them. Silences are like the abyss, and man, they stare right back.
It makes my husband mad, this annual (down from monthly, weekly, daily) event where I realize I might never know you again and cry. He gets mad the other burdens fall on me too. I know you know who I’m talking about. (Even as I know you’ll never actually read this, and I’m writing this for me.) I get that abandoning people is a survival technique for you. But the rest of us can’t write people off so easily. I don’t know if that makes you wise and me a fool. I guess only time will tell.
Sometimes I get mad at you for leaving me like this. Sometimes I wonder if you know how badly this hurts. Most times I feel like I have to pretend that it doesn’t, to try and be tough and stoic like I always mostly am, like I’m Saint The-girl-you-left-behind. I’m afraid I’ll scare you off with strong emotion, like you’re a feral cat. But I don’t know how to stop feeling things about you. This is unconditional love, even if I find it unconditionally painful.
So anyhow. I’m still here. I still love you. Just like always. I’m sending a card to your last known address. Hoping it gets to you, that it finds you well. Wishing that this year will be the year when things change and you come back.
I’ll always be holding the door open, just in case.