Of Leaving

There is that moment when someone actually leaves your life and there is that moment as it is forever frozen in your mind. It is a strange phenomenon.....sometimes when remembering someone leaving or the ending of something - - the memory doesn't at all coinside with the actual chronoligical timeline. For example, a relationship may have ended far after that last moment that it really really existed.........

I had this boyfriend on and off for years......crazy boy - - older than me - an utter hell on wheels kind of boy. The kind your mother hates and you love......and your mother thinks you love him because she hates him. He was my wild adventure....and I still remember the first moment I saw him and how I wanted that rebel outlaw (you can read: loser, if you want). He was so wrong for me and so out of control. We spent most of our relationship on the brink of his insanity. He drove a red camaro (that I went with him to buy for $4500 cash), he listened to Iron Maiden, slept with my close friend (after I went home! - yes the same night), drank too much, did too much cocaine (or crack?), and was constantly in trouble with the law and generally a menace. I spent so much time picking glass out of cuts and bailing him out of jail and comforting him when he was down. I visited him in boarding houses, crack houses, and jail cells..........but it wasn't all like that.

He was the smartest person I ever met. He mastered this language like I couldn't believe - - his thoughts and the way he could turn a phrase would fucking kill you. He did my french homework for me in highschool and sometimes college -- just because he liked to, in fact - I wonder if on some level that is why I lived in Paris for awhile? Hmmm... After the alcohol and the drama - - when all the glass was picked from his wounds and we'd left the scene of the crime - - - he would be so candid and so honest - - it would break my heart. Sometimes he was really just this boy who needed his father's love and got beaten instead.....sometimes late at night - - he knew who he was and couldn't bear to look in the mirror and had to look at me to be ok and I needed that too. I needed to just sit there in the silence and be looked at and spoken to.....because only at those moments was I really totally alive. Only at those moments did I ever know true unconditional love for another human being - - and only at those precise moments was I accepted as is......I was enough - more than enough - - just me and so was he, rough edges and all. For all the trouble he caused - - all the times I had to explain away him showing up at my mother's house at 2am drunk........it will forever be worth it - - for what I gained is unimaginable. I am sure some readers (if there are any) would think this is merely the nostalgic reminising of a now grown - once naive girl.......of that I will never know. But I do know when he would take my hand in his in the silly red camaro with the t-tops off and Iron Maiden blaring - - I could feel his pulse and see in his eyes what we had for each other - - our commanality in life. It was never like being in love with each other - - I don't know that I could have accepted so much if it were that - - it was like being in love with life or something else.......like not being alone -like feeling content in my soul for one second.

After he died I would have these vivid dreams for a whole year of just sitting and drinking at a table with him and having conversations. Really - for about a year I slept in this otherness - - this world of strange communication. It was never sex - never kissing - never adventures.........just us talking and being completely ok.......even if the whole night was spent silently at that dreamscape table - - we were ok. It is strange that I never really thought of that in this way until I just wrote this ....but I guess in some ways our relationship ended far after his life.....and in some ways it ended before.

There is this moment - - this very particular moment when he died for me.....not when he was hit by the train, or when I saw the look in my brother's eyes of the unimaginable news I would have to bear, or when Steve told me what happened. It was this moment leaving his house about two weeks before his death and he looked at me. He was lying in his little sister's bed and watching me leave - - asking me to stay. It is so strange because it had this surreal feeling even then (or at least it does in my memory but memory is subjective - so who knows). I felt like he was taking a picture of me with his eyes. And the really bizarre thing is how that memory still sits in my head......I remember it through his eyes. I mean I never lived it that way and I know it is crazy, but I remember watching me go from the room. I see it all - - my brown cordory pants, my grey wool sweater, and brown doc martin's......and I could see myself as beautiful - - not some tom boy with my hair cut too short and my pants too baggy. I think that was the moment the relationship really ended .............when I left that room - it was forever gone..........before the death and the tears and the craziness to follow.......something left at that very moment or at least that is how it will remain for me in that moment forever frozen in my mind.