daryl dixon’s poncho, lizards, autumn in the mountains, bob dylan, death proof, snapping fingers, ufo sightings, banjos, american football, squirrels, tequila and candy corn, calling for bob dylan on space mountain, avocado cupcake frosting, ahhhringes, wonder woman, nasa tshirts, joan baez, long car rides, milkshake and fries, compasses, laughing in french (555), night vale, typos, the mystical us, the friendship that spanned dreams, the good things, the lovely things, the now terminally limited number of things.
i noticed this stranger on a bus a year ago, and at first i couldn’t figure out why they were making me feel so uneasy, why i kept wanting to stare at them, but was afraid, as if they could have burnt my retinas. at first, i couldn’t figure out what about them was tugging at the strings of my heart, but when they lifted their eyes and for a brief moment met mine, i instantly recognised those eyes; i’ve seen them in a different face. and it’s like that often; life’s been like that often for the past many months. i see her often. i feel her often. but not like i used to.
she wouldn’t look me in the eyes at first, and sometimes that’s all i can remember about her. she wouldn’t look me in the eyes at first, and i don’t think that i’m ready to write this chapter, but maybe now’s as good a time as any. when i met her four years after first talking to her, she wouldn’t look me in the eyes, and i felt like we were farther apart than ever. i hate, hate, hate it when people don’t look me in the eyes (partly nurture, but mostly nature). but then she explained to me that in her culture, people just don’t do that. lakota people don’t stare, because it’s rude. if only she’d have accepted that staring is all i do.
it was an early morning sometime in may and the entire edinburgh was still asleep. she, her friend, and i were hungover and tired, and had to catch buses that were going to take us to opposite directions. we had accidentally ended up at a stag do a couple of nights prior; the best man was welsh and bald, and wore bright blue underwear. and so that morning we were about to part without so much as a hope to see each other again at all. and i remember missing my bus and sitting on a toilet with a closed lid in the bus station bathroom, and bawling my eyes out to fill the empty spaces carved out by unspoken words of appreciation, because no words would have been strong enough anyway. have you ever tried to explain to a friend how wonderful it is that you happened to meet them in this life? it’s always a mess.
i keep waiting for a morning when i’ll wake up and her memory will have faded from my mind; for an afternoon when i won’t look at a stranger’s eyes on a bus and have my heart stop beating for a second; for an evening when i can no longer feel like a murderer. and sometimes those moments are so close, but i can never quite reach them. and sometimes i remember driving around in the dark with her and eating milkshake and fries in her car. sometimes i remember taking a walk along a hiking trail in the woods with her and joking about bear spray and listening to her talk about school as i keep my eyes glued to the forest floor so that i don’t trip, and inevitably watching her booted feet glide across it in front of me; willingly following her to wherever. sometimes i remember decorating the house for halloween together and how she whipped out her art supplies and dedicated at least a couple of nights for that, just because she knew halloween’s my favorite holiday. sometimes i remember the first dinner i cooked the first night we officially became roommates, how we ate it on the tiled kitchen floor because we didn’t have furniture; sometimes i remember always making time to watch tv shows together on that thrifted couch that smelled like cat piss; sometimes i remember blasting bob dylan’s christian albums on our little road trips down to new mexico. sometimes i can still remember being accepted and loved in a way that makes you feel the intoxicating taste of the word friendship in your mouth.
she was contradictions. she loved bob dylan but blasted k-pop in her car. she thought she’d lost her ability to joke but talked about it in the most hilarious way. she told me i was light but kept throwing burning matches at me because to her i was pitch black night. she let me have her love but she hurt me more than i could have ever imagined was possible, she hurt me so much that it ripped me out of numbness. i gave her my heart, i did, but she wanted my soul.
she thought she knew what my heart looks like better than i. she was like that a lot of the time – adamant.
ah fuck, i don’t know how to talk about you. i’m still more used to talking to you. ‘life is a beautiful and complex web of shit,’ you once said to me. and you sure as hell helped it stay that way. although these days it’s becoming easier to casually mention you in conversations; to strangers that have never heard of you, but sometimes even to people who knew how much you meant to me. i think for a long time with the hurt that i was left with, there was also a sense of shame – that i allowed myself to be this broken by all that i knew and loved of you, and all of my friends knew.
and i know i’m being biased, and i’m not trying to pin the blame on either one of us, and i know that in the end it’s both of ours. but you destroyed me, and i haven’t healed yet. so please, forgive me for these words. you destroyed me, and i can’t believe i’ve grown so much that i am able to say this: you destroyed me.
funny though, sometimes i feel mostly hurt by what you said about the scarf that i gave to you. i guess that’s the thing – it was so, so obvious to me why i chose that present for you; i was so content having wrapped three meaningful secrets in it. but you had no idea, and you chose to hold a grudge against me because you had no idea. that’s the thing.
i very clearly remember telling you two things – direct quotations – ‘my thick skin isn’t a shell, it’s scar tissue’, and ‘i love you’. both’re true. both don’t mean a thing at this point. i just hope you’re happy, i hope you’re happy, i hope you’re happy. if you’re happy, i’m happy too.
i can choose to remember whichever parts of all of this, i can choose to not be afraid of the past, i can choose to talk about the lovely parts, and not the ones that hurt like red hot branding iron. but i will forever feel stupid in your presence, even in the form of memories. i will forever pretend i’ve not been to the edge of life, hanging, just barely, when your eyes and your words slashed me like whips. after all, you’ve convinced me you knew what i was when you picked me up.
long eyelashes and crooked teeth 