silencehaunted

[silencehaunted]

desert/d

I’m writing here because i’ve found myself again in some kind of odd juncture, where i am a stranger even to myself.  I feel cheated because it’s been a long time.  I feel totally lost in the desert, but it’s not where i started-- i’m on the other side.  And I didn’t realize how big this damn desert was. 

This month I actually, for a brief moment, felt the sensation of desire for the first time in over a year.  I wanted to seize it but i’m thwarted-- it didn’t go very far, and i don’t know how to follow it.  It was a little mirage that reminded me of a self I’ve lost, and I miss that part of me.  I’m bored by this new person. And i also don’t trust her. 

 I’ve had a few blips here and there but mostly it’s been scary and hard to even feel connected to my body or my emotional self when it comes to the idea of a partner.  Yes i did just get out of a 9 month relationship three months ago.  But the reality is that I wasn’t in a place for it, I am still all ground up by grief in a way that feels very frustrating.  A few drinks with that very lovely, kind person who opened his heart a bit to me always ended with me dissolving into tears, and it really didn’t have anything to do with him. 

 I don’t ~want~ to feel like this, and I feel like it’s been too long that I have. I am a slow burner, it takes me a while to find people I want to be with, and it takes me an agonizing amount of time to move on from person to person.  And each time it’s like peeling off a layer of skin. You’re ready to bleed, or scab, or worse, that you’ll peel it back and just see bone. 

 I also feel sad and confused about what is coming from my grief and what is generally the me that’s always been there but I prefer to ignore.  The construction of longstanding self-beliefs, stories, and damaging painful worldview that I have adapted about my life since I was 14 years old.  What’s old and what’s new?  I’ve been sitting here with it for a few days trying to tell.  And here i am, still totally lost. 

I finished Kathy Acker’s “Blood and Guts in High School” last week and there were moments in it that made me feel connected and seen.  In the middle of the book there is an interpretation/ discussion of the Scarlet Letter, and the protagonist gets really into explaining how in love Hester was with the Reverend even tho he didn’t quite love her enough, and the society was so fucked up that he was pressured and convinced to love her less. And how she endured that because she was being instinctual.  She, confused but authentic, just kept really loving him hard.  I remember that I felt that once, but I also can’t remember the actual feeling.  It’s really just a passing scent of something faintly pleasant i’m trying to remember-- the smell of a flower after the petals have fallen and the smell is gone.  

I want to be patient but I’m not even sure what I’m waiting for.  Remember how I felt when i was really, really in love is like trying to remember the song lyrics without remembering the tune.  I can get to a certain point but then I start mixing it up with other songs and I know I’m totally off track, off key, and I don’t even know if I’m towards the beginning or the end. 

I spend my life, truly i spend my life,  surrounded by handsome men who care about me.  But they are all my friends.   I can’t remember what it is to be looked at and seen in that nice way.  Sometimes I feel desire but I can’t conceive that it’s possible to be mutual.  And then i weakly make an attempt, and feel proof that it wasn’t mutual.  I don’t even have enough pride to be ashamed anymore. 

 I’m being tested.  I feel like there is a dead plant in my heart, dry and drooped, despite my watering.  I put water in and it just flows over the top of the pot and out the bottom.  The plant can’t absorb it. 

  Sometimes I look at my friends in couples, and i just don’t even know how it happened. I don’t understand how people met each other, how they became a couple, and persisted without death or some other hideous disruption tearing it apart.  I’m 35 and I feel old and I’m baffled.  My peers are getting married and having children and I don’t even know what happened to me.  I don’t even know how to begin.  I feel more confused than when I was 14.  I feel like I’ve tried all the different scenarios and I’ve ended up here, with literal ashes in my wake.  I feel Alone most of the time.  I know i am plenty popular and I’m comfortable in myself, thank god, but I feel closed off to the most meaningful form of affection, in fact it seems like  it’s not even available to me.  It hasn’t been offered to me in a long time. I haven’t been able to receive it in even longer. 

Sometimes when I’m really lonely, and I really wish I was with you, and I try to remember parts of your face. It’s all fading fast as I knew it would.  But i still hate that. The thing I remember most is the bump on your scalp under your hairline where your hair was starting to thin.  I remember touching it often while we would talk.  I can’t imagine touching anyone like that again.  I can’t imagine I’ll even know someone like that again.  I don’t know where to meet them, and I’m sure that when I do, they will want to be my friend, and I will remain on the other side of this invisible fence, emitting from the scorched earth of my heart that keeps me separate-- from the connections I miss, the connections I crave, the connections that would make me feel fully human again but i can’t figure out how to pursue. 

[silencehaunted]

holiday

Last night i got home late, a little drunk, and a bit sweaty, and tried to settle down into bed.  But i was kept awake thinking about today and tomorrow.  A whole year.  A whole year passed.  When we talk about grief we talk about the sadness mostly, the stages, these strange elements that the most disruptive also become the most familiar.  But this process goes deep beyond all of these things.  It’s how life becomes an odd curiosity again, how routines and patterns become disrupted and challenged.  When life is beautiful and good and fun, there is a little quiet reminder to absorb more of it, to rub it in because it’s not always like this.  A ash on your tongue always in everything.  A little curious piece of yourself wonders how your enjoyment is different now then it was before, because you can’t really remember after a while what that version of life was.  This has been true with every death I’ve experienced, especially my grandmother, who spent every holiday with us.  Christmas is totally different now though I’ve learned to love this version.  But in the back of our minds there is always Grammy and how christmas once was, and I can only imagine how many mirrors lined the back of grammy’s mind, reflecting so many different memories and realities.  Grammy actually died on Christmas eve, the first christmas she wasn’t going to spend with us because the journey had become too great.  Christmas will always belong to her, in every form.  So unfortunately for my mother who deeply misses her mother, more than I can comprehend until I will myself miss my own, Christmas now has a double signifier.  In this way I am lucky-- June 6 was never a holiday before.  Now I get my make my own holiday for Oren’s memory.  Maybe in a year or two I won’t remember when June 6th rolls around how the whole thing felt.  That in its own self will be a weird sadness.  Loss is constantly shedding itself.  Last night my mind raced with how I should spend my holiday.  I have taken the day off from work.  So what would I do? I planned a walk through our parks, I planned to eat perogi or dim sum, I planned to go to the used bookstore and choose something to take home.  But instead I just laid in bed for hours.  I laid in bed, took a shower, ate, and laid in bed more.  I watched television.  I texted a friend asking her if I was wasting my special day.  She replied, “don’t let capitalism trick you into thinking that you have to be productive to be having a special day.  Laying around IS SPECIAL.” Now it’s 6:35 pm and I’ve only just gotten dressed.  I am going to go to see other Emily and we are going to make Lasagna together, Oren’s favorite food.  And then we will drink wine and talk about our lives.  And observe the day.  And i’m not sure how it will feel but I am happy to have someone who wants to observe the day with me.  Laying in bed I thought about the days spent laying in bed with him.  Particularly the day that it was raining, and we laid in bed for four hours listening to the Velvet Underground, and the song Heroin came on, and I felt awkward, and i listened to the words, and he turned his back to me, and we laid in silence, our backs pressed against each other, knowing that the subject of the song was the acknowledged unacknowledged thing that would keep us forever a bit separate.   I can’t hear that song anymore.  It’s a shame, because it’s a beautiful song. 

[silencehaunted]

for love means being alone

  I was trying to relax on saturday because i needed to.  I had gone to bed the night before in a melancholy mood; confronted with the future and the past at once, a pregnant friend I used to live next door to, who now lives across the city.   I can’t help but feel a bit of a cloudiness when a friend becomes pregnant just because i don’t understand the urge to want to bring a life into the world.  

  I guess i have had it a few times, when I’ve felt really in love, when I wanted to build up the perception within myself that it was possible to escape and build your own reality away from loneliness, permanently needed and connected, full of happy and close moments, a heart full of forgiveness, gratitude, and protective urges.  But memories of my own childhood anxieties and the constant witness I bear to unhappy children and interpersonal family strife everywhere i go.  The haunted sense looking out my childhood window of the terror of being out there without help, of being alone in the darkness, and wondering what was really between myself and being in that place, where i would be blind and vulnerable. 

 When I was a museum educator sometimes little kids would reach up to hold my hand, despite not being invited to and without fear of rejection.  I would always take their hands.  If i could live forever in that, holding a small child’s eager hand, well that would be different.

anyway i digress.  I extremely digress. ( And also don’t worry I know i’m wrong about being a parent.  I know it’s some thing I can’t imagine, and i’m telling you yes, you’re right.)

i’m telling you this i GUESS because maybe it’s got something to do with my bad boundaries.  If you end up trying to parent every other peer and parent in your life, eventually you don’t want to parent anyone, because you let everyone get too close and you feel like you’re losing yourself to others, who tear off your heart like so many pieces of taffy, and when you say that you want to keep some of it for yourself, they start to cry.  this weekend i asserted a boundary and it hurt so much to do it.  I broke a heart.  But my therapist said sometimes you have to break hearts to keep from shattering your own.   That asserting boundaries is a new muscle for me and i’m just sore from using it for the first time.  But how can i convince myself i don’t owe people my heart?

after asserting my boundary firmly and finally i put the phone down and just started to weep.  I wept fully and heavily. my usual just dessert of low key grief was topped off with some whipped cream and a cherry of pain-- the pain of not being able to fix pain.   The ache is always spreading; sometimes i feel like i’m patient zero.  Can i strap on a mask and cover my mouth and hide my voice? If i do that will i prevent you from being in the state i’m in? 

i wept and then i wiped my face. And then i put powder on my face and eyelids and put my eyeliner back on and rode my bike to a dinner party with people who i knew would understand without me having to tell them a damn thing. so i made a choice to put my pain away for the evening.  i’m getting better at boundaries, or maybe just compartmentalizing. 

later in the evening, several bottles of wine in, i had a moment when i looked in my friends eyes and i felt like i was holding that smiling and trusting child’s hand again.  i felt innately understood and like i was being given something and i wasn’t going to have to give things away to get it.  I was being given admiration, love, understanding.  I was being given connection that i didn’t fight for or earn or wrestle.  I was being given openness in return for openness, and true selves revealed nakedly.  There is such relief in being naked. 

This look from my friend was a quick look, but a meaningful one.  Connecting with the living, not having to hide or give up anything, not having to make some insane promise or carry a load to earn it, or soothe it or crutch it, not having to cry for it.  Just love and respect and warmth. I can’t get it out of my head.  ----    ...When somewhere, from deep within me, there arises the vivid sense of having been a child, the purity and essence of that childhood where I once lived: then I can’t bear to know it. I want to form an angel from that sense and hurl him upwards, into the front row of angels who cry out, remembering God.     For this suffering has lasted far too long; none of us can bear it; it is too heavy— this tangled suffering of spurious love which, building on convention like a habit, calls itself just, and fattens on injustice. Show me a man with the right to his possession. Who can possess what cannot hold its own self, but only, now and then, will catch itself for a blissful moment, and throw itself away into the air, as a child throws a ball....

(rilke 1908 https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/3205/requiem-for-a-friend-rainer-maria-rilke) 

[silencehaunted]

Won’t... You... Tell... Me... how?

I was sitting here watching Golden Girls just now and one thing I really love about that show is how fearlessly they talk about death and grief.  I just watched an episode where Sophia makes a friend-- Alvin-- but he has alzheimers disease.  Eventually in the episode he has to go live with a relative.  Sophia cries and says that being grateful to be alive is not enough-- you need a reason to get up every day, to feel excited, to feel like there is a fun future for you. 

and then i started crying.  Sometimes it happens like that.  Less so now.  But this year has just been so full of grief and also of great kindness and self-realization.  I have gotten so close to wonderful new people.  I’ve learned so much about what’s important to me.  I’ve changed the way I live in many ways; and I’ve begun to address things about myself and my life that bother me but I couldn’t confront before.  Or i guess I am always attempting to confront but never finishing.  

It’s the end of the school year and i’ve been riding my bike.  I make sure to cut across to Ave A before I get to Oren’s family restaurant on 2nd avenue.  It’s the last place I saw him and the day was May 24 2018.  We met there after my last final.  We had studied for all of our finals together.  While we were studying we would take breaks to go eat perogis at northside bakery or to walk around the park.  I’d complain about family things and how I wished I could be myself with my family, and he’d hold my hand and tell me about his family and the trips he was taking with his mom and how worried he was about her, just mostly because he was a mama’s boy, and how much he loved her.  And he would tell me about what a genius his sister was. 

 And he would get really excited about the future, and all the things he was going to do, and how he was going to manage his sobriety, and how he was going to get a new job, and all of the trappings of what he thought a good life was made of.  We were always at the precipice of something.  Once he told me that he felt we both got along because we were both always striving for self improvement.  I agreed.  It was fun to have someone who was so hopeful around.  He would get grumpy but to be honest rarely showed me discouragement.  He’d show me worry and fear and disappointment, but never defeat.  Not until the last two weeks, during which we kept having plans and they kept getting broken, and I was getting frustrated and worried and, quite frankly, annoyed.  And then just like that he was giving up because he told me he didn’t believe anymore that he would ever be well, and then he was gone. 

Anyway this whole year has been an epic journey that has felt like a million years.  I knew it would and I was not wrong.  I have started to take antidepressants and I am grateful for them.  

I’ve been close to a lot of other deaths this year too but none that were as close thank god. All aqquaintances.  And it was so strange to go to the rest of the funerals this year and just feel the sense of nothingness that i left his funeral with.  I got to see beloved people who died slowly of illness celebrated for their legacy, and I got to see a celebration of my young friend who was caught in a tragic circumstance that might have even been murder, but I got to see his photo surrounded by flowers and hundreds of people cycling in and out.  I’ve learned that one of my best friends has had something around 15 friends die in the last 5 years.  I can’t imagine it but actually I -can-, and that’s what I hate.

 Then there is all of the grief and sadness we all carry living in this time.  They are banning abortion right now.  Every day is a goddamn fight.  I’m tired but also, there’s no allowance for that.  Fighting is the new normal. 

of Orens funeral i remember little.  I remember trying to go see the tree he had told me he planted for his mother on the terrace and running into his significant ex girlfriend out there, and her giving me dagger eyes and running away from me.  I remember feeling totally alone with my friends there and not integrated or known and feeling so lost in that.  I remember having to go out in the street after and it raining and violence approaching us from every side on our walk to get drunk at the bar, what else could we do. 

The pain no longer stings in my chest like it did those first 6 months.  But it is always with me.  

Anyway I was sitting here watching Golden Girls and Hulu always tells you how many episodes you have left.  And i have 135 golden girls episodes left.  When Oren was alive we were watching the show Cybill.  I liked it because I felt like he and I were very much like Cybill and Ira.  And then that show got taken off the air very abruptly in it’s third season.  There isn’t even a finale.  It’s just over. 

Now a dear friend of mine has lost someone to opioids.  And i don’t know what to do.  And i can’t even touch it, it’s too painful and overwhelming.  And I’m sure he thinks i’m a dickhead.  But i really just can’t get close to it.  I don’t care if its a different person than Oren.  I just can’t touch it.  My healing feels totally fragile and breakable, maybe even brittle.  I want to keep it wrapped in bubble wrap in a box, safely tucked away.  I want to only look at it when I can.   I feel horrible but that’s just how it is for me.  Maybe I’m selfish or maybe i’m just self aware.  I sometimes can’t always tell the difference. 

[silencehaunted]

Last night i went dancing at St. Vitus with Steve and Paolo.  New Order came on... that song they use in Trainspotting that repeats “oh it’s the last time oh it’s the last time oh it’s the last time...” I had my eyes closed and I was dancing pretty hard, jumping up and down and swaying.  And suddenly I saw you in my mind, in your denim jacket, in the bar, at Irenes, after I went to see Cocksparrer and you came to meet me to get back together after a little fight.  And i had said a song I loved.  And you said, “do you want to hear that right now?” and put it on the jukebox and danced towards me.  and suddenly i had you in my head there with me again, and i couldn’t see you very clearly. And i focused in on the different parts of your face and tried to remember.  And i tried to remember your tattoos and realized I had forgotten one.  And while i was dancing, there with my eyes closed, I took inventory of your face, of your voice, of your hands, and i tried to remember how you danced, and I felt so far from you and yet there you were, with me again; i had almost forgotten you and there you were, to dance with me and remind me of everything I’ve lost.

[silencehaunted]

The magical thinking is fading a little and it’s a relief.  Although I don’t know, maybe it’s just more of a background noise now than the dominant strain.  It feels like life is learning and unlearning, over and over.  

When I was a little kid my brother was around to make up games with.  Then he got older and started doing other things.  I remember one day very clearly when I was bugging my mom to play with me and she had tasks to do.  She said, “the best thing for you is to learn how to play by yourself.  Use your imagination!”  From then on I mostly played by myself, and I would sometimes have a friend over and then had to figure out how to translate my alone games into partner games.  I mostly loved playing pretend.  It was so scary to bring a friend into my pretend game, because they usually didn’t know the characters like I did, or would reinterpret them and take them in another direction and you had to find a way for that to be thrilling. 

As an adult I feel like this is what dating and love is.  You figure out how to do things by yourself because you have to; and then you suddenly have a friend there who wants to play.  You adapt and reinterpret your games and your ideas to include them.  And then they go, and you’ve got to heave a sigh and try to figure out-- how do i play pretend alone again?  It’s different now because I know the characters differently.  I learned things about them.  They changed before my eyes.  And while it seems like it should be easy to go back to the original game, you can’t.  You have to make it totally new again.  So the process of learning to be alone, and then learning to include, and then learning how to be alone again, and then meeting and including new people....

Its transformation, again and again it’s transformation.  And maybe the character played by you changes less or maybe it changes more.  Maybe you like one set of rules and you try to build the next round back around those rules.  But it’s never the same twice.  How many different lives, in the end, will I have imagined in this house, in this body? How many will be recognized by another person? How many will die with me alone?  How many will the public recognize? How many will be eulogized?   Talking to my friend Mark he says, “remember always that our parents have many secrets too.”  I both want to know all the secret selves and none of them. 

At first I was insulted to be a secret life of Oren’s but today it feels nice.  there was an oren that lived in this house and sometimes in parks and gardens.  He lived a few times on the beach. He lived daily in conversations.  But he was a character in my story and it was a first edition print and no one else ever gets to know it.  There’s some beauty in that.  

Trying to unlearn it while protecting it forever, as I’m it’s only archivist. 

[silencehaunted]

For the moon never beams...

A few weeks ago there was a cold snap and for the first time in a while, your ghost walked me home.  Maybe it was just because you know how much i love that big parka with the overwhelming hood.  I watched the way you’d shove your hands down in the pockets hard.  I wonder sometimes if they’ve given all your clothes away yet.  I want to go through your pockets.  When the weather got cold I thought of your face sulking out from beneath the brim of the hood.  Your face in shadow.  Leaning forward into your black hood to kiss you in the cold, our hands in our pockets, my own annabel lee. 

We walked past the laundromat and the air had that crisp dampness and I could hear your voice telling me again, like it was the first time, about your family and how they had died.  how almost no one had survived the holocaust.  About how your grandfather was a genius scientist.  About how your grandmother killed herself and they didn’t tell you.  You told me these things so many times and always like it was the first time.  And the second time and the third time you told me I was almost relieved because I had reacted so badly the first time. i made so many mistakes. i didn’t know how to be vulnerable like you needed me to be. 

 The first time I was alarmed and felt my heart running.  I verbally ran away. I turned a sharp corner and started talking about my own Grandfather’s PTSD from fighting in the battle of the bulge.  I was scared to acknowledge what you were showing me.

 Wet socks was my grandfather’s trigger, from being lost in the black forest in the cold. 

 I remember as soon as the words were tumbling out of my mouth I regretted them.  I didn’t know, yet, how to just be present for pain.  I didn’t know how to shut up.  But when you would forget, and tell me again, I had another chance.  I had a chance to serve you well.  I had a chance to listen and ask supportive questions, to try on the uncomfortable, thin & revealing garments of my best self.  the vulnerable me.  The me who wasn’t afraid of my own love. 

 I got more comfortable wearing my emotions softly.  And you let me get better at it, all the time.  My life with you was full of second chances. 

Now when I have wet socks, I think of my grandfather, and then I think of you.  How many layers of meaning does life store up? I remember my beleaguered Grammy, tired after 80 years of life, once looked at me over soup and said, “nearly all of my friends are dead.” I didn’t know how to follow that up.  I had a lot of questions that I couldn’t ask about it.  I didn’t know how to ask them.  What does it feel like to be haunted? I wish I had asked her that.  She was cool and would have told me. I know she was troubled by her ghosts. She didn’t hide them.  She kept them by her side, and talked about them.  My gramps was always there with her.  She didn’t lock them away. 

I hear you saying, “My grandmother killed herself and no one told me.” I think about you at the laundromat, telling me again, in your ridiculous gym clothes that were glorified pajamas.  We were going to spend a cold spring day together, but you were thinking about your ghosts.  I remember sitting next to you at my kitchen table the third or fourth time you told me.  I remember receding into myself and considering my reaction.  One of my most insightful professors told me that in a poem, when a line is repeated over and over, it never means the same thing.  Every time it’s said, the meaning is changed.  I thought about that a lot with you.  What does it mean now that you’re telling me this.  Does it mean you will also kill yourself? Don’t say that, I said to myself. I said something else.  But the something else was some kind of veiled promise that you didn’t need to kill yourself, because I was there and loved you. 

But of course without saying the word love.  I remember our first winter together playing backgammon and drinking tea and you urging me to take my time, think my moves through and be more strategic.  You loved strategy games. 

[silencehaunted]

the thinning of the veil

I’ve been thinking and talking and being open about my process of learning to live with the dead.  In all my reading of poetry I always fathomed that surviving the death of a loved one meant that, like opening a drain, you could run the faucet hard for a while and then shut it off again and everything would be clear again.  That’s not quite it.  It’s more like a drippy faucet that leaks a thin stream of water out forever.  In 2011 a beloved man, Jake, whom I had dated quite seriously as a young woman, died in a skateboarding accident.  I remember the profound realization that all the things we had once shared now belonged only to me. So much of intimacy is a connection between two people when they are alone, free to be and expose themselves to the other, to be truly naked in their presence. To lose the other piece of the memory, the soul you could present yourself so freely to, is bizarre.  You start to lose track of what actually happened.   But that summer Jake would visit me in my dreams.  We didn’t talk much when he visited, just held each other.  I would wake up and feel warm and comfortable, knowing that he was just showing me he loved me.  It didn’t alarm me, though it always reminded me how much I miss him.   What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m not afraid of ghosts, or meetings with the dead in the dreamworld. And I think the dead know this because they are prone to visit me.   The night my friend Fran died he came to me as an angel in my sleep.  I called my mother the next morning and she told me that he had been in hospice and had died the evening before.  He came to say goodbye-- I knew on the astral plain that he had passed before I knew it in waking life.   He had healed his old wounds, mostly it seemed, he was not on the run from himself.  He could say goodbye, and go.

Oren keeps visiting me, but he doesn’t say goodbye-- he’s trying to hang on.  And I don’t mind it, i feel sad for him, that he got stuck here between the worlds.  As other Emily said, to watch the fun and not participate-- to still be here with no opportunity of pleasure.  As someone who was a true hedonist, this seems like an awful afterlife to bear.  It’s halloween, and i’m sitting in bed sober & solitary with a white candle burning, wondering what sleep has in store for me. I used to put months of thought into my costume and the ideas of fun and ridiculousness that would delight me, playing at spooky stuff, trying to scare each other.  Today, Jeremy and I, exhausted from work and school and our emotions, just had a nice dinner instead of revelry.  I feel too world weary to revel.  We talked about the old days when we wanted to dress up and go wild in the streets.  Jeremy said, “maybe it’s because we know real horror now, we don’t have to play pretend.”  I said, “Yeah, I walk with the dead every day.”  I meant it. 

Someday we will be back to say Boo! to the dead.  But we have to help put them to rest first.  And that is an arduous task.

[silencehaunted]

the cruelest month

its almost a month since you left me and on friday, i woke up, and just started sobbing, realizing that you really --aren’t-- coming back.  And no matter what we were going to do with our relationship, what you were going to do with your drug habit, in an alternative reality i would still be talking to you every day, i’d be helping you get a new job, i’d be helping you get into the school of your dreams, I was ready to do it all and willing to.  

Now all that i can think about is how to fill this gaping hole.  This hole of energy and joy and effort that was filled with the power formed through the circuit between you and I.  

Towards the end when you started slipping and i was panicking i started to believe that maybe someone could love me more steadily.  But we’re all fucked and no one can really get over themselves to love freely, it seems. 

 One night we laid on my bed and the curtains were billowing and we had the most tender interaction and then you pressed your cheek to me and told me that you were certain that you would die before me and that you weren’t worth the risk.  And I said there was certainly no way to know that, and tried to soothe you.  I thought you were being hyperbolic. 

A month later drunk in a cab you put your head in my lap and told me you loved me over and over and over. 

  And i hated the drama of it all, i was just waiting for you to settle in.

But i kept trying to talk myself out of you too.  I went to a screening of “the panic in needle park.”  I went to “a long day’s journey into night.”  I watched every piece of film i could that would predict just how awful my life would be with you.  To try to rid myself of my devotion which proved again and again to  be unshakeable.  Because of that look on your face when you were about to say something funny.  Because of all the hilarious twists and turns and witticisms you’d throw out, just over nothing-- the little things you’d appreciate about my nature that feel invisible to most people, most of the time.  

And 4 weeks ago you told me i was the most important person in your life and you were thinking a lot and you wanted to have a serious talk. And i was terrified because i didn’t want to get chained to an endless cycle of this awful, unstable shit.  But my heart also leap because, god damn it, you’re so sharp! And smart! And, honestly, COOL.  

When i felt a connection with someone new i didn’t mention you, i didn’t want to. But you followed me around, like if ziggy was in love with his raincloud. 

and then you did heroin again that weekend after many months of hard-won sobriety and i just felt my heart crack like lightning down the middle.  

And i finally was sick of this cycle, and i started to tell my new friends that you were my ex.  I was going to get some distance until you were well or until forever.  But i missed you every day.   I was going to get distance but i wasn’t going to leave you.  Or that was the idea but i was sure I really couldn’t. I knew you needed me, as much as that worried me, and felt like a terrible weight when you were doing drugs. 

And then five days passed, and you were dead. 

I waited for you for so long to come around.  But not because I’m a sucker.  But because I couldn’t imagine not spending my days with your wit, your sensitivity, your smart observations, your wry commentary.

And now I have to live without it every day.  

i can love again.  I want to love again.  I need a place to put all the love you left here, rotting on the vine.  But HOW.  but how. 

[silencehaunted]

the last morning i woke up with Oren he told me this song was in his head. 

[silencehaunted]

loving/activism

I had many teachers on how to love throughout my life. I had doting parents and a kind older brother.  I learned to love from a steady diet of Mr Rogers as a kid.  It was the most important part of my young day.  Pre school, play with Kristen, Jimmy Dean Sausage Muffin, Mr. Rogers.  I had his tapes.  I had a t shirt.  I listened to him constantly and learned so much. 

 I learned to love in church, where we took our roles as good and loving humans as the first and foremost goal.  We took in refugee families from Kosovo and housed them in the bishop’s cottage and ran a food cupboard for folks living with AIDS which was my first job.  My church school was taught by an amazing single mother, a Sudanese lost boy rebuilding his life in America, a gay man living with AIDS, and a lesbian youth minister.  We got weird, had church sleep overs and cooked dinner for our families in the church community room.  We had a disco and a talent show where I sang songs from sister act in a nun habit made by my Haitian friend’s mom.  I never remember talking about the bible I remember learning about love. 

I read Leo Buscaglia in 8th grade and his new age, open hearted realness changed my life. 

But at the same time we pick up a lot of darkness. I was always attracted to dark, dramatic literature.  I wasn’t afraid to watch the news.  I was indoctrinated to act and speak up when I saw injustice.  At 12 I would pretend to be older and talk to people in early online chat rooms and give them advice (ahahaha!) on all of their pain and trauma.  I knew the dark patches that were outside my door and I didn’t like pretending they weren’t there. I was torturously bullied in school for being chubby and a nerd and when I was in 7th grade I became so afraid of facing boys who would openly torture me in class that I stayed home sick a lot and was exclusively driven to school because a boy loved to call me BEACHED WHALE daily.  Every day in the car with my Dad the song “On A Downtown Train” would play on the radio during the morning commute.  That song still reminds me of my deep sadness.   I was terrified of what they thought of me, and moreover, what they’d do to me.  I saw racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic violence at my school. I also met powerful young people who wanted to work together to change it.  I helped start a gay/straight alliance.  I became a Straight Edge punk-- mostly in private-- because I was scared of drugs but also because I liked that they did work with the homeless.  

I saw how fucked up the world could be.  I saw how beautiful the world could be.  I saw them both in equal measure.  As an adult becoming an activist was so much about breaking through the walls of this.  It was about triumphing over all those who cause pain or danger in so many different fashions. It was about stomping up to the loveless and showering them with warmth, or challenging them to turn off their cold.  It became about broadcasting the LOVE MESSAGE.  But i also was rigid and scared that if i ever put my sword down i’d get stabbed. 

Over the years I have become more fearless about the love message.  But I have also remained afraid.  I have looked for signposts on the road for safety but the only safety is inside with you as you walk along the road, it’s in the warmth we radiate.  As an activist and a person who has known great pain and great love of course i have become a box time and again for a beautiful, hurting man to bury his secrets in, to love quietly in a secret space, to share in private the love we need all the time.  It became both an activist adventure and a hearth and home.  But it was still a pandora’s box and it was still full of pain and danger.  In terms of radiating love that he could feel, see, hear, appreciate-- I won.  In terms of my activism, in keeping him alive and safe, I lost. 

Is love it’s own activism? Have I tangled my tool box too much?  It’s hard to say.  I tried to love and save, but in the end I just loved.  As an activist, it feels paltry. 

The great irony is that Oren gave me the love he could, but often couldn’t rise to the occasion of the love i really needed.  One night i was sick and slept on the couch because I was so ill, and he woke up to check on me. I remember him standing over me, asking me if I left the bed because of him.  I told him I left the bed because I didn’t want to make him sick.  Then in a moment of feeling weak and tired, I begged him to hold me, i felt so sick.  But he wouldn’t.  He went back to my bed to return to sleep, and i cried.

  Many other nights he did hold me, and i know he did love me.  But i remember when he refused.  And I remember how tragic it felt.  I remember how he apologized for it, and how cold that apology felt.  It was like he had turned off the love generator to save power. 

my friends are now giving me so much real, abundant love.  They are loving me, dumping so much beautiful golden love on me, supporting and saving me, holding me without hesistation... and sometimes i wonder if i was accepting less than this love because I thought my own love was enough to get by. 

it wasn’t.  it left me wanting.  And it hurts to remember how much I tried to love for both of us, and how he just couldn’t, sometimes. 

[silencehaunted]

listicle

if i get 4 hours of sleep it’s a good night

i am keeping a bottle of lavender oil in my bag to spray in my face when i start to freak out 

Sometimes i forget he’s dead for a minute or a few hours and i feel so guilty when i remember

I feel guilty a lot these days

like when i have a good time i feel guilty or when i feel connected to a loved one i feel guilty

this week i have lost my keys and found them again in my wallet and i have gone to the wrong office and forgotten to do major tasks and yelled at people who were trying to help me

if something makes me feel good or ok i get really obsessed with it and can’t stop thinking and talking about it because the novelty of feeling normal is intoxicating

whenever i eat i feel sick 

sometimes i start to doubt my experience and feel like it’s all an act and i can’t even tell i am tricking myself

then i remember that he is actually dead and the hollow feeling comes back and then i feel guilty again 

[silencehaunted]

my anger phase

today begins my week of big events.  Remember how two months ago I told you the public library asked me to teach a master class on community partnership building?  Remember how you helped me negotiate the terms?  Man, I was so excited to do this class back then.  

But your death has robbed me of my ability to feel joy and accomplishment like I used to.  Which really fucking sucks because I worked really hard to get where I am right now, this week.  I had so much work to do this month.  Remember all the times we discussed the summer and I said, I just have to get through June and really kick ass?  Well thanks for totally destroying June.  Now all of my big work events that i had anticipated and looked forward to  are chores that feel absolutely impossible before and during, and then after I just feel empty.  Like seriously, this couldn’t have been at a worse time.  Not that there would have been a good time for you to die.  But July is really open, and you have made my life unequivocably impossible in the only month that really mattered.  I had an opportunity to give a speech to the UN folks next week.  Now it’s risky because my brain is barely there, i doubt i’ll be on the agenda anymore, and it would be for the best.  But you know I would have SHONE giving that speech.  Now i have to find a generator for my inner light.  

Today I stood in front of a crowd of eager librarians and struggled to hold onto my thoughts.  I think i did a great job acting like I was present, and I did even have a few moments of being there fully, but mostly I was struggling not to pass out.  The room was topsy turvy and i felt so thirsty and tired.  I usually get really into presenting and this time I started saying weirdo stoner shit because i could barely hang on.  Then I had airbnb calling me because I had to cancel my reservation for Jennie’s wedding and it got so complicated.  thankfully the woman gave me a refund.  You were gonna go to that wedding with me.  Now I won’t go at all.   

I talked to your friend Dave today and told him about some of the recent work developments in my life, and how i would have been so excited if i wasn’t dead inside right now.  Dave said, “In a way, Oren took that from you.”  He’s right.  You took away the pleasure of so much hard work, life events, and opportunities.  Now I just have to sit here and feel sad and tired while the memories of your love and your body are fading so fast that it makes me feel guilty, tired, and heartbroken. 

Oh and last night i had a great time and then i felt guilty and scared.  Scared about building a new relationship, scared about finding a new partner, scared and sad about my natural physical impulses and needs and desires.  Now I have to rebuild everything and it’s because of your idiot error, and your cruel exit from my life where you were cherished and loved. 

[silencehaunted]

The last two days I have managed to sleep a reasonable amount and eat two meals a day.  The wind whipped, ice cold burning sting of separation is lulling into a hollowness, an emptiness that isn’t so much like a complete torturous distraction and more like a buzzing void.   I went back to work yesterday and when people asked me how I was I was honest.  I said “Ok” if I didn’t feel like getting into it and I said, “my boyfriend died last week” to those who I felt could take it.  My intern cried, i felt really sad and like a shadow that she had never noticed before walking behind her. 

My loved ones are being so kind and gentle and generous.  I used to struggle with accepting love and now I am like a sea sponge for it.  I’ve been reflecting on old Emily a lot.  How worried and anxious she was.  How performative she was.  How joyful, loving, carefree she was-- but how she always found new things to concern herself with.  New projects to carry her anxiety, new social issues or community problems to tackle with all of this rage and electricity that seem to have settled and found their place in grieving.  Honestly I don’t miss her that much.  There was too much weight on those shoulders in a pack she constructed herself.  Why was I trying to fix everything?  Why was I so millitant? 

It’s not that I don’t believe I can change the world now, it’s just that I feel like there is a gentle energy that the world needs more than my tanks and gusto that I used to release daily.  Like coming down here into the cold darkness I realize that what we need is warmth.   How much could I have healed if I had been more calm and less concerned with my political stances?  I remember giving Oren a very long lecture on the book “King Kong Theory,” and talking about all these different fights within feminism, and him listening intently from the couch I am sitting on now, but him also sighing and saying, “I get it, but what about closeness?  What’s wrong with wanting to feel close and safe with someone?” 

I didn’t get it because I was hiding all my pain and fear and rage in my ideas.  Rigidity made me feel strong but it actually just made me so breakable.

Writing this i feel frustrated with myself because I don’t think that Old Emily is dumb.  I don’t think she was lacking.  I just think I have discovered this whole room inside me that is full of understanding and pain and sorrow and reality that I was keeping locked.  I didn’t want to go in here and acknowledge the deep isolation and loneliness this modern world gives.  I was resolving it three nights a week when I would take a tired man into my arms and make him feel better.  But that was the least political thing I had ever done.   It was just coming out of the core of me, radiating from my heart’s heater that despite my best efforts I could not turn down. 

[silencehaunted]

two years a day

Last night Inbar and i went out to eat, and I didn’t feel despair.  She walked me home and I showed her the set up I had made, with Oren’s photograph and some candles.  I told her i was waiting for a sign from him, I was sending him love every time I felt troubled, lighting a candle and burning some incense now where I used to text or call. 

We sat and talked a while with the candles burning, lamenting that they had not met, feeling sad that they would have so much in common with their backgrounds interests and experiences.  Suddenly, I heard a loud pop.   What was that? I asked, and Inbar pointed to the shelf that had held the incense.  The shelf had shattered, the incense scattered all over his photograph, which had flipped face down. 

I texted my witch friend who assured me that, as a new spirit, he was still learning how to show me he was there. 

This morning I woke up peaceful and felt some relief.  I ruminated on how all we can truly do for ones we admire and love are to be there for them in a deep way, to be open, to be accepting of their love and also to know how to ask for it.  I felt good that Oren and I were very good at this communication.  We asked for and received love from each other every day.  I always knew what kind of support he wanted from me, and I offered it freely and generously, and I recieved it in the same way I gave it.  

I decided this morning to try to loosen my grip on the pain of the questions, the pain of the exit, the pain of it all.   And to just keep my hand on the love that I feel for him, the loving acts that I shared with him, and the reality that when he needed a tender caretaker, I readily offered myself every time, and when I needed him, he came running.   I thought about unconditional love, and how I had learned it’s true meaning loving him.  When we made mistakes, forgiveness was imminent. We valued our loving connection.  We cherished the bond that we shared. In one of our fights he asked me if we could “get the fight over with because he hated arguing,” and i said, “i am not coming to make war, I am coming to make peace,” and the relief i felt radiate off of him was immense. 

I walked through the day thinking about this kind of love, and all the many exposures i’d had to it this week, both in reflection on oren and also with the caretaking that my friends have provided me with. 

I came home and read poetry.  I ate dinner.  i relaxed. 

But then i watched Queer eye and there was an episode about a couple together for 3 years who were proposing to each other, and there was some fleeting comment about how “you were put here to take care of each other forever,” and it just set me off and i started to weep.   I know that it’s a platitude, and i also know that in the time he was given, i literally did take care of him until death do us part, so what am i even worrying for?  But i am not worried anymore, I am just heartbroken.

[silencehaunted]

i can’t stay away

I felt really healed and better yesterday morning, but by yesterday night i was trashed again.  I am walking the stations of the cross daily.  I may be able to stave it off for a few hours, but I find myself walking the square again and again, like a broken toy. 

  I move from forgiveness and love and lack of judgement, to foolishness and fear he did not really love me, to thinking about all of his secrets and how the uncertainty of them now hurt me, to thinking about how the secrets revealed have scarred me, to thinking about what a very sad final days he must have had and the pain he was in when he died, and then back around again.

This pain is not just because of him but because of the cruelty that transpired at his funeral when his friends kicked me out and told me I was not a valid mourner because they did not know me.  I am clasping at this pain and my hands seems themselves to be in rigor mortise, i can’t seem to unlatch the pain and suffering of these last few weeks. 

Last night after a complete breakdown at stations 2-4, I rode my bike home and sat in front of the candles and incense i’ve set up in my room.  I sat down and focused, and found myself telling myself, “you have to let this go.  You have to let it all go.  He’s dead and gone, he’s not hurting anymore, and if you move on you can also live again.  You don’t have to carry the fear anymore, nor the secrets, nor the frustrations or dissatisfaction of his fragmented life.  You don’t have to lift him or drag him forward when he’s struggling anymore.  He’s gone and he’s safe and peaceful now, he can do no more harm to himself.  He was a terminally ill man and you gave him all you could.  You have to let him die, don’t keep him alive through your pain.”

After this i slept for 5 hours.  I woke up with the Bee Gees song “Nights of Broadway,” in my head. 

Here we are In a room full of strangers Standing in the dark Where your eyes couldn't see me

Well, I had to follow you Though you did not want me to But that won't stop my lovin' you I can't stay away

Blamin' it all on the nights on Broadway Singin' them love songs Singin' them straight to the heart songs Blamin' it all on the nights on Broadway Singin' them sweet sounds To that crazy, crazy town

Now in my place There are so many others Standin' in the line How long will they stand between us

Well, I had to follow you Though you did not want me to But that won't stop my lovin' you I can't stay away

Blamin' it all (blamin' it all) On the nights on Broadway (blame it on the nights on Broadway) Singin' them love songs Singin' them straight to the heart songs Blamin' it…

[silencehaunted]

the worst day yet

today is the worst day yet.  the funeral was a bizarre surreal performance and not a solace for me. i feel way worse now.  I feel really really like a deep sense of void.  i almost slept but then i didn’t at all.  at all.  i scrutinized every single thing i said and did at the funeral.  I sat bolt upright to write bizarre apologies to people i’ve never spoken to for saying something wrong and then resisted and then talked to two friends in other countries b/c it was normal for them to be up.  now i am going to the therapist.  i don’t know what to do.  i feel more lost than before.