#14: Lost Texts
In the notes app: Part II
We are the first generation to look back at what we said in perpetuity, thanks to screens, and capture the ineffable: time. I have over 7,000 messages from you sitting in the deleted folder in the Texts app on the MacBook you reluctantly gave me. I don’t read them, but I move them out of the Deleted folder every so often and then delete them again.
I never miss you when I’m happy, but I almost always think of you when I’m hurting.
I do “hard things” and sometimes wonder if you’d be proud of me. I hope that you would be. And why? I think. Why do I care what you think of me? Because you knew.
Later on the same day that we picked up our divorce papers, I was walking out of the Walgreens on Sunrise Blvd and you were outside leaning against the car smoking a cigarette under the shade of the tree. How I wanted to run into your arms and put my face into your chest. My heart sank because I couldn’t. How you would always smell like tobacco and salt. How it always smelt good to me. How you never, ever tasted bad. How a dirty, rotten part of me secretly loves men who smoke cigarettes thanks to you.
When we signed the divorce papers my gaze was blurred and pooling, the paper wet with fat droplets leaking from my eyes. Shock and disbelief. I told you right then how sad I was. Should we leave? you asked me. No, I muttered, signing on the line.
How did we get here? I know. I know. And yet.
You were one of the funniest people I knew. You were a pathological people pleaser (which I hated) with a judgemental disposition about people (which I kind of relished). It was mean occasionally, and sometimes unattractive and uncalled for, but It was often accurate. You had a sarcastic bite that made me laugh. When I went on a horrible date a few months ago, I wanted to call you and tell you about it. I knew you would so casually and monotonely make fun of the guy in a way that was piercing and hilarious at the same time. I knew it would make me feel better. But of course I didn’t.
In any dream I have that you appear in, you are with other women. In the dreams, I approach them and say, “He doesn’t love you.” Because that’s what happened in the end, isn’t it?
Grief came in waves. My friend, my friend, my friend.
There’s a loneliness to this island.
The sun is setting and my body relaxes, conceding to the heat as the cooler temps approach as a “reward.” That’s the difference between a New England summer and a Southern one, I think. A reward at night, and night is my greatest delight.
I still hate summer(s), I think as I sit on the porch, lightheaded with a slight pressure pulsing at my temples. I relish in this hatred, Existential Kink style. It’s the most challenging season for me — too much yang, heat stress, what feels like eternal fucking sunshine. My ideal days have a chilly edge, a little overcast, rich colors, and a roaring ocean. And wool. Lots of wool and coffee and never getting tired from the ball of fire hanging in the sky directly overhead.
I have a “nocturnal” natal chart meaning my Sun placement sits below the horizon (in the 4th house illuminating ancestry/lineage, my childhood, intuition, and themes around unveiling the past). All around, a lover of the cool, damp night. A dark hug of sky, stars illuminating their deaths lightyears away. Yet we see the stars now, ever-present and bright; they connect us to the past because they are the past. This is the 4th house, to me. Eternal dark and glimmering light. A sonnet in the gloaming.
The ephemeral joys of summer are what keep me connected. I think about the flowers and herbs, in order, I foraged, sat with, and created things with in my time here so far: daffodil, violet, dandelion, lilac, lupines, beach rose, peonies, chamomile, and now spruce tips. Each of these has come and gone, showed themselves brightly, slowly, then all at once. Foxglove is blooming as are poppies. I didn’t grow up this way, bearing witness to the seasons and naming flowers. But they welcome me and take me in now as if they’ve always known me.
The Milky Way is visible here sometimes. It gets so dark with a carpet of stars painted overhead that I feel like I’m in a dome, a sort of simulation. How is this real? Also, fireflies. The other night delight, the other reward. Ephemeral, like the heat, like you and me. Like the dead stars we look up at in the cool night and smile.