The Goodbye You Always Wanted

There’s always a droning sound here. It’s the freeway traffic mingled with the power lines. It’s meditative. The view through the window is warm and sterile. I live in a city that wants to be beautiful, the scene says to me.

I’m sitting on this new bed in this new room in this new apartment with this new roommate and I’m still drowning in memories. Memories of you so sweet as to sting.

Everyday is harder than the last and easier. You’re becoming a dream. No longer present, I wonder if I really spent a year with you at all. You are fading into the ephemeral realm of “once upon a time.” I will tell the story of our love, punctuate it with details of our bees (honey and Burt), details of our mornings. I will recollect you with the deepest fondness, and I mean that literally.

Throughout the day, every day, I will collect once more the sights and sounds that remind me of you. I will collect them in a box in my chest like so many knickknacks. At the end of the day, everyday, I will drag this box home and unload its contents onto my bed. I will examine each fragment. I will marvel at your distant majesty. I will marvel at our once shared grace. I will be consumed with fervent regret and faint hopes of future chances. These pieces of you I find throughout the city will become innumerable. I won’t be able to keep up. You will blur into a mood. You will become a feeling.

I’ll put on chapstick and feel you in my lips. I will cook and when someone asks how I made it, it will be with you in my heart that I tell them my exact method. I will pet cats and dogs with you in my fingers. I will give them Eskimo kisses and the tickle of their whiskers against my cheek will be a silent, distant laugh from you.

I will see women that remind me of you while not having all of the composite elements. I will search for you in everyone and come up short. I will make jokes that only you would laugh at. I will make decisions with you as the judge. What would you do?

I will smell vanilla and you will be in the tear I shed from longing. You will transcend from being a fact of my life to being an energy about it. We understood each other more than anyone else.
Thus always to past loves: their spirits cling to us like morning dew.

After it all, and yet again, you said you thought I was a good person. You said I was the man you fell in love with. That I had just fucked up.

I have only heard about such grace in church, and if the grace of god can save a sinner, then it’s your grace that will save me from myself.

You are my heart, and my days shall be silent tribute to you.