You feel farthest away in the morning. Nighttime is when I cry but after the sun rises I am mostly just angry.
I’m so angry that you’re not here. So angry that I won’t ever see you again. So angry that things keep happening, life things, that you’ll never know and that puts stuff between us, that stuff will add up to a distance that gets wider and wider. We’re all going forward and you’re standing still, frozen like a picture in a video world.
Thoughts like this and the anger collapse into what this really is, this overwhelming sadness at the realization that is still the same shock every morning as when I last spoke with you: I’m never going to talk to you again, never going to hear your voice again. How can that be.
How can you be gone. How can you be gone. My heart actually hurts.
I did it, I did the thing. Wrote the book and submitted the manuscript. Of course it’s just in a slush pile and likely nothing will happen but that wasn’t, isn’t the point. Whether it never sees the light of day or becomes some effing enduring classic, the point is, I did it. You were the first one to believe I could, to encourage me. The first person to tap into this deeply buried ambition. And because you were so smart about everything, and not inclined to praise anything unworthy of your time or attention, I believed you, believed that I could. And now I have, and you’ll never know.
The husband put me on the back of his motorcycle and we rode over to a publisher located here in the city and I dropped it off myself and then posed when he took a picture of me there in my motorcycle jacket and my now-empty messenger bag in front of the publisher’s building. It was a beautiful day, like summer. No fog, sunny, warm, no wind. The kind of day that just makes you feel grateful to be alive, which made me think of you, so that when I handed the manuscript to the man that opened the door, my face was tear-stained but I wasn’t worried, no way could he tell because I had my helmet on and sunglasses, all he saw were the butterfly and flower and heart stickers all over my head.
So anyway I did it and I will stick to the deal we made as though you were here alive and hanging out with your kids and living your life and happy for me as I know you would be.