last night

it's like this: i'm sitting around in pajamas, eating breakfast cereal and idly chatting with friends and strangers via the internet. i read the news and update my facebook, i laugh when chau farts in his sleep. a message appears in my inbox from jake's dad. a question is asked and answered.

and then it's like this: i am shivery, weak, and ill. he has been dead for two weeks and here he has died all over again. a moment later i am composed, because i have to be, and i get on with the business of a normal day. i bake a cake. i shower. i accompany my sister to the library, and then to the tattoo parlor.

the scene is this: we are in the car, she is driving. we're just done laughing about something or another, we're eating ice cream. a moment's silence passes, and then i tell her what i've learned. i'm crying all of a sudden, shocked at how wet my tears are, at how little comfort i've gleaned from two weeks distance, from ice cream and everything. a void opens up and threatens to swallow me, just out of my line of sight, threatens to turn me permanently into one of those thousand-mile-stares weirdos. i sit in the car, too miserable-looking to go in with her. on the way home, we talk about it for a minute more, until something else comes up- and something else always comes up- and we're laughing again.

fast forward: it is three days later and i can't sleep for the need to hear his voice, so i call his voicemail over and over and commit to memory every rasp and inflection of his voice. i watch and rewind and rewatch in my mind: our first meeting, our first fight, our first kiss, our first i-love-you. i sublimate thoughts of him with tedious book reviews and essays on existentialism, both of which lead somehow back to him. i layer three comforters on myself and pretend to be warm and asleep until i am.

the next day: the morning is a blur of coffee and make-up and clothes, and i make it to my meeting on time, early even. i sit in the lobby and read bierce's witty letters, and mid-chuckle i get a flash of memory. i remember the blonde hair on his arms, and running my fingers over it eversolightly and i think- sifting through his ashes won't be the same. his arms and his arm hair don't exist anymore. i sit there with my breath caught in my throat, trying to conceive of the inconceivable until nancy calls me in and i'm all smiles for my picture.

later: i roll up my jeans and walk towards the water's edge. the sky is flawless, the beach is empty, i am peaceful and smiling. and then i step into the water and watch the fine brown sand slide and shift as the water recedes and i think, this sand could be you, will be you, eventually, someday, sooner than it will be me. and then a pelican dives for a fish, and raquel is laughing and telling for the thousandth time the story of my pelican guardian. i'm walking along the shore looking for seashells, i'm laughing when someone falls fully clothed in to the water, i'm face-up on the sand contemplating the vast blueness of the sky. walking along, i notice the heart & arrows & initials someone traced into the damp sand, and i trace yours and i realize they look like the symbol for pi, and i wonder if everyone knows i'm off by myself because i'm thinking of you?

now i wonder, is this how it's always going to be? i'm alive in this moment as you are not, but i'm alive in the past with you as well, and i'm alive in a future without you but always missing you, simultaneously. i look in the mirror and i wonder: is this me, all there is to me, these irises, this skin, this hair? because your arm hair is gone and that means you are gone. your mole i named jose is gone, and that means that you are gone. but my fingers that love(d) your arm-hair are still here, and my lips that kissed your mole are too, but how can they really be if you're gone?

everyone misses the ideals you represented, and i do too, but i also just miss the visible, touchable, actual fact of you, of your existence and your presence. two weeks ago, i had LA because this is where i live, and i had- was acutely aware of, plotted on my internal map- SD because that's where you were. now, i know you're everywhere, but that just means you're nowhere.

i write this down because i can't talk about it, because good, loving, supportive people just don't know what to say, and who am i to inflict such awkwardness and helplessness? they are trying to live their lives, as i am mine. what's weird is that despite myself, i am succeeding.

at any given moment the floor may open up

happily, the doctors are through reviewing my chest x-rays and are satisfied that i will not perish of tuberculosis anytime soon. on the other hand, that the skin test was positive is testament to the fact that my immune system is extremely sensitive to stress; if, let's say, the love of my life dies, it's not just my mind that falls apart, but my body also. fun stuff. the ultimate upshot is that i meet my assigned child next week, as well as with the principal, who will help develop my lesson plans. excitement amidst tragedy! for the past few months, there are three things jake and i talked about: his sickness, my job search, and how much we missed each other/what we were going to do once he was better. he would have been more excited than anyone to hear that i'm finally going to have my own personal pupil to corrupt and enrapt. i hope to do him proud.

i'd really like to get ahold of his mom and offer my condolences (whatever the hell that may mean), but my attempts to find a way to reach her have been stymied. on the one hand, she is living in a nightmare world where her oldest son died after courageously fighting- and defeating- cancer for months, and what could i possibly have to say that wouldn't fall on pain-deaf-and-numb ears? but on the other hand, if she loves him more than anyone else on earth, then i am at least a close second for the title, and i wish her to know that i understand and am there if she needs anything at all in the world, because let's face it, she made him and i love him, and one of the bigger regrets among the untold thousands that i will harbor from now until eternity is that i didn't meet her while he was alive, in his presence. he was so certain that she would love me, and he loved and admired her so much that i was sure i would love her as well, and yet we never met, thanks to the unhappy confluence of geography, insecurity, coincidence, and sillyness that were our lives for the past few years.

and it feels like a betrayal to even think of this, but what about the funeral? if i have thought about him and the fact of his death every day since the day it happened, and i have, and if i have mourned it, constantly and quietly, every other minute of every day since i got the news- via text message, let it be noted, because really, how absurd can you possibly get?- and i have-- if these things are so (they are), then i wish someone would tell me why and how it doesn't feel quite real yet? i read the comments everyone is posting "to" him and about him, i look through pages and pages of pictures, i relive snatches of our times together, i call his phone just to hear his voicemail recording, and i know that he's dead. and still i think, maybe? maybe i'm dreaming a really vivid dream where all the pot i've smoked is catching up with me, maybe it's all a terrible misunderstanding, maybe i can find a wormhole and go back in time and save him, maybe the ground at my feet will open up and i'll fall through to some hideous inferno where he's being held hostage until i can with my wit and cunning and vast stores of alternately love and rage win him back to the world of the living. maybe i can push through the screen of reality and touch all the other realities that might have been, and find the one where he got better and stayed better, where i can call his phone and he'll answer, where he grows up to be a famous writer, a husband, a father, a world-reknowned activist-singer, the so-cal master of barbecue, a grouchy old man on a porch somewhere- i'll find that happy land and stay there, if i can't bring him back to this one, to undo the things that need to be undone for him to be here right now.

my favorite, the one to which i always return, is the one where i attend his funeral and walk up to the front of the room to see him pale and somber on the wooden dais, whereupon the tears start up, and i lean in to kiss him one last time, and voila! like a post-feminist snow white fairytale dream, my kiss and the love in my heart and the tears in my eyes bring him back, and everyone oohs and ahhhs and we live happily ever after, content with the destruction of death and modern science that we have wrought.

if i see it, if i see him and see that he's not himself anymore, i think i stand a better chance of believing it. at which point i will attempt suttee, or cry mutely in his mother's arms. unless she hates me. ah life.

what i talk about when i talk about love

it's strange how he died five days ago, and already i'm expected to be done talking about him, thinking about him, crying about him. it would be easier to keep it to myself if everything in the world didn't remind me of him, everything, everything, every ridiculous little thing.

who is going to finish my ice cream cones now? who is going to try every ridiculous recipe that pops into my head without complaining, with lots of teasing? who is going to shake me when i'm on the verge of tears, who is going to invent mixes for me, who is going to leer at me from behind a door or a gravestone in the middle of the night? who is gonna yell at me to shower, knowing perfectly well that i only went six days without a shower once and for very good reasons? who is gonna watch the latest animated feature with me against his will, and then deny that he enjoyed it when he totally did? who is going to gag whenever shakespeare comes up in conversation, who is going to let me win at thumb war, who is going to muss my hair whenever it gets too neat? who is going to go to the pier with me on a windy day to watch the birds fly backwards?

it's strange to think that i knew a jake that no one else knows, and that by extension, i am the only one who can miss that jake, as well as every other jake besides.

how seamless seemed love and then came trouble

it's just like him, i realize. i shouldn't have expected anything more. off he's gone to be one with all things, to push up flowers and see the really big picture from afar, and here i am, thinking about him, like i've always done, like i'll do for the rest of my life.

there's nothing stranger than the fact that life goes on, that you can't cry forever, that eventually the memories don't hurt as much, that maybe someday they'll make me smile. you spend five years getting close to someone, learning them and loving them and arguing with them, you spend five years planning the next year and the next and the next twenty years, albeit loosely, like the kids that you are, and then you wake up one morning to find that he's gone, and your plans are for naught, and that when you think about him one thousand times a day, you're thinking about someone who does not exist outside of those thoughts.

you meet someone as a child, and you doom yourself to loving that person forever by virtue of the fact that you're growing up together, and when you do that, he becomes a part of you, and aspects of your person will always be indebted to him, just as aspects of his person were due, for better or worse, to your presence in his life. and then you wake up one morning, and realize that those hard-earned pieces of your personality, those painful lessons and those glorious awakenings, are all you have left of him.

you meet someone when you're vulnerable, and your wrap him up in the gossamer threads of your emotions from the first, and eventually, he gets vulnerable with you, and the threads pull tighter, until you are one hundred miles away from him and he is still more present to you than the person standing beside you, at all times.

you love someone for so long, and so hard, that it's a given like your next breath, like the sun rising, like the world spinning around. you love him even when you hate him, when you wish you'd never met him, when you spend your days thinking about not thinking about him anymore. you love him when you shouldn't, you love him when you don't love anyone else, you love him with every surge of blood your poor ragged heart pumps through your body. and then you wake up one morning to having to wonder what exactly you're supposed to do with that love, the same love that never arose for anyone else, the love that reason forgot.

so where does it go when it's gone? if you were here, you could tell me, matter-of-factly, the way you said everything, especially when i was being fantastical and ridiculous and emotional. alas.

“I seem to spend my life missing you!”