No maps
I’ve been making travel plans today. I have my guitar camp trip in January, and a family trip to Mexico in February. It was a little disconcerting to see how much vacation time I’ve managed to accrue to allow me to not only do both trips, but to extend the Mexico one an extra day, and still end up having a week’s vacation available come Memorial day.
I’ve never had a surplus of vacation time. It took me 10 months to get out of the red for the “vacation” time I ended up taking right after A died. I didn’t have the option of taking time off to get my bearings; in fact, I was at work when I found out he had died. Most days I managed to get to work, but not much work happened. Almost none, in fact. I spent a lot of time at my desk crying silently, in the bathroom crying hard, but always silently. When I wasn’t doing that, I was zoning out, or reading old e-mails he’d sent me. I left early for weeks; some days, I didn’t come back after lunch; on really bad days, I just stayed home. It all added up fast.
And when he was still here, I spent a lot of my vacation time making quick trips out to California to see A whenever a long weekend was feasible, or taking time off when he visited here, plus my own vacation plans. I had to balance the time, and there was never enough of it. And while I’m glad to have the vacation time, the fact that I do was another unexpected reminder: You’re not going to California anymore.
I got the Mexico plane ticket squared away easily enough. My family, a place I’ve never been before; the only hesitation was whether or not I could stand that much togetherness. It says a lot about where my head is at since A’s passing that I decided to take the extra day with them because my parents are actually slightly older than he and could go anytime, and I wouldn’t want to regret missing that day. Perspective—I’ve got it by the truckload.
But then I started looking at plane tickets to San Francisco for camp. Even that wasn’t so bad, and I didn’t even pause to think, as I did last year, that I’m not supposed to be flying into San Francisco; I’m supposed to be driving up with A. Then I decided to consider going into Oakland instead to save money, and pulled up a map to see how far the two airports are from each other. And that’s when it hit me. The map with all the place names we’d passed every time we went into The Fucking City, places he would tell me about because he worked there once or knew someone there, or I recognized because I’d seen the road signs so many times—that was what slammed me right in the heart. I could feel it like a physical sensation.
The ambushes don’t bring me to my knees anymore, but they often make my eyes hot with tears. The acute phase passes pretty quickly with a few deep breaths, but the emotional hangover can last a little longer. Though I have to admit, I was probably primed for this; it’s been an up-and-down week again. I’m fine when I’m busy and engaged, but when I’m alone with my thoughts, the sadness and the ache for him rolls in, as if it were just awaiting its cue. As has been true all along, I don’t know what causes one day be easier or harder than another.
Thursday night I was writing to him in my journal, and I got lost in my pictures of him as the pen fell still. They are my screensaver on my laptop, which I angle so that I can see it from my chair as I write. And for the first time ever, I looked at him and realized how much older than I he was. It’s not like I didn’t know, but it had barely figured in our relationship. Last night, though, I looked at the pictures and saw an old man, and I don’t know why. He’s never appeared that way to me before, nor ever when he was alive, despite the hair that was silver on the sides and in his beard, and missing on top. All I could think of was that the pictures were static, and that without a continual fix of seeing him animated, smiling, laughing, frowning, thinking, maybe something was lost. Maybe it was something in me that was struck in that moment—I’d been kind of low all afternoon and evening, missing him—because I don’t see that today. Today I just see my sweetie as he was: vibrantly alive and beautiful. Maybe it was part of my brain making me see that he wasn’t all that young, that this wasn’t all that unexpected, to which part I say “Screw you.” He was too young to go.
I never know why I am sadder some days than others, why some days I have extra bonus missing-him on top of the baseline missing-him I do like breathing: constantly and only half aware. I sometimes think it’s when the reality of the situation becomes clear to me once again. There is no half-assing this death business; when people do it, they are stubborn about it, refusing to come back. You reconcile yourself to days, and weeks, and months without them, but they keep staying gone. It’s an insistent absence that you have to come to terms with over and over again, as once more the “never agains” become as clear and painful as shattered glass. No matter how carefully you clean it up, you’re likely to end up bleeding a little.