I ended up crying in the bathroom at work today. Haven’t done that in awhile. And just when I thought I was done crying, a fresh wave of tears would come. I was in there awhile. I just miss him so much.
As I’ve mentioned, I have a wealth of written records of my relationship with A, in the form of thousands of e-mails and chat archives. I could never afford to print them all out. It would be thousands of pages. And I’m lucky to have them. I know it.
I thought, when he first passed, that I would read them all the time. And in those first couple of weeks, I did. I read and I cried my eyes out. And then I worried that maybe I’d be reading them too much, but that’s not how it’s happened. In fact, I’ve felt like I’ve been avoiding them for the most part, only revisiting them when the jones for him is really strong. I wondered why I would be avoiding them, and suspected that it was a self-protective mechanism. As I sat crying in the bathroom, I realized my suspicions were correct.
With the friend’s birthday today and all that brings up, and my missing A more than usual lately, I decided to read e-mails from this day last year. We talked about the birthday, talked about his work; he was under pressure, as always, but more than usual to get some projects done. His e-mails were sparse at that time because of it, and his home computer was in for repairs, so we weren’t chatting every night as was our habit. I missed him. But on the way to those e-mails, I had to pass the ones from mid-July, the last ones I sent to him, begging for a response because I wasn’t getting any. I know now that he was already gone when I sent them. Those always bring tears to my eyes, and though I could just pass them by, somehow I don’t manage it. When I see them, I have to read them, though they’re a knife in my heart. All the fear and dread and worry I felt when I wrote them come back to me. And then I read the other ones, and I can tell he’s tired and stressed, which no doubt (at least in my mind) contributed to his cardiac arrest. Yet despite his being overextended and overtired, he still made me laugh in his e-mails. That brings its own exquisite pain, because I am reminded in his own voice just why I loved him so much, and it makes me miss him all the more. And I end up crying in the bathroom at work.
No matter how much "better" I get, I still miss him so much it overwhelms me sometimes. That doesn’t get any better. He’s not here where I want him. If I could call the next life and chat on the phone with him, I could live with that until I got there. But I don’t have that option, and I get to live with that, like it or not. I just miss my sweetie so much. I say it over and over again, here and in my head, as if the volume repetition of the inadequate words will be able to express the depth of my feeling. But they don’t. They never can.