#8: Lost Texts

In the notes app

Hey. I’m at Whole Foods. My breath is caught in my throat as I sit in the dining area for lunch, something we would do. Only Exception by Paramore is playing on the speaker. Funny, as I was just singing it a few days ago when it fell into my head. 

When I was younger I saw my daddy cry and curse at the wind.

It’s hard to reconcile that last month you were my husband and we were getting groceries and drinking coffee by the water. We went to my parents for Thanksgiving and brought your mom along. Not even a month after that I was moved out, leaving our apartment and beloved cat behind… leaving it to you.

And I've always lived like this, Keeping a comfortable distance.

My mom gets me a strawberry latte at the coffee bar. The syrups are from France, the same ones we used at the coffee shop I worked at. You hated when I said things like that — “from France” — or drank coffees with flowers or fruits. It’s weird, you’d quip, not looking at me.

And up until now, I had sworn to myself, That I'm content with loneliness.

You’re no one to me anymore on paper. It’s so shocking to reconcile. Whiplash. My chest feels dull and sad. On my hardest days of tapering, you’d take your ginormous hands and place one on my chest, without me asking, because you knew it’d help to regulate and calm my system down.

But what neither of us will admit is that toward the end, the many times I was broken down, was because of you.

Because none of it was ever worth the risk.

---

My mom is sitting close to me as I type. “Who are you talking to?” she asks. “No one,” I say. And it’s true. 

No one in my family talks about you. It’s like you never existed. Tyler brought up Chickens and I wept outside like a baby. Does he think he did something wrong and that’s why I left?

I know you're leaving in the morning when you wake up.

No one asks how I’m doing, but I’m okay with that. I talk to the trees, to God, to my journal, and to the notes app like I’m doing now. I try to eat the orange chicken you always loved but it keeps getting caught in my throat. Have you ever tried to eat while simultaneously trying not to cry?

Leave me with some kind of proof it's not a dream.

Shame swells in my belly along with the orange chicken and strawberry latte. I was a bad wife. A bad friend. Wasn’t I? I didn’t do enough. For you, for us. That’s why you stopped loving me.

Like a ping pong table in my brain, there is a back and forth of my badness and my sadness and my consolation that it’s for the best. I think we both knew there was an expiration date, I just didn’t know it would be in a whirling blink, like a freakish mid-spring snow. Unexpected. Chilly. Discouraging. Depressing? this is my life. And yet.

And yet.

This is all part of it. The intricate, giant, fragile, sturdy, stunning web of my life. Being built and falling apart. Being built again and again. This. is. my. life.

I feel it in my gut, hugging the shame like a sleepless child. I think of the trees, of God, who remind me of my place and my belonging in the family of things. Who remind me of my goodness.

Oh, and I'm on my way to believing.