Tuesdays again.
10/31/23 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alasanonI’ve been struggling with this all year, trying to figure out a how and where and when and I think, maybe, today, one of his favorite days (despite being a bit of a ‘for me every day is Halloween’ type) second only, maybe, to Valentine’s day, or maybe first after all, it doesn’t matter any more if I can’t remember the details.
But this year Halloween happens to be on a Tuesday, and maybe that’s the right day to try to write it out. I put on one of his favorite movies and I’m just going to try to put some words together that might stand some chance of expressing how I feel and felt.
…I can feel myself trying to shut it down already, but I’ve been doing it all year, for many years, and I need to try to not. If this place is not safe, then nowhere is.
It’s odd, because I don’t exactly miss him. I don’t not miss him, in the way I always did and now, always will, but the fact of the matter is that we couldn’t actually be proper friends, afterward. …I just looked, I didn’t really write about it here (well, there) when we broke up, at least, not the day of, or directly really at all. But I miss the experience of him, the joy of him, the oversized personality in a larger than life story that he wrote for himself. The last few times I saw him (and I saw him every year until the last two) he was so diminished. He was no longer the vast being encompassing so much of time and space that I experienced, just a man, sick and sicker and small and smaller. I miss his enormity.
He died, if I noted it correctly, on the eighteenth of January, 2023, with family and friends. His body had given out. He had amputations, heart attacks, strokes, infections. Everything about him was withering. He could have held on a bit longer, struggling, and chose not to, with grace. I have this on the authority of the one who was there, who stayed, who held him up in ways I never could because I couldn’t handle the idea of seeing him die.
(There is guilt here. Do I have the right to write this? …but of course I do. Of course. At his funeral, on a friend’s goddamn birthday, they saw me and we held each other and I said “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” And they said “He loved you so damn much.” And we wept because who else would understand but someone else subjected to his love? Someone who subjected him to theirs?)
Fuck winter. I’ve known so much death in winter. Only my grandparents died in summer.
I cried a lot in the days after his death. I logged back into the book of face and read what people said about him. I logged back into the twt account we were still mutuals on and looked to see what people said about him there. I posted the twinkling motes of sorrow I felt like making public, little bubbles that didn’t touch the morass of feeling I let myself sink into. I talked about it a very little with one or two people who would understand. I pretended I’d moved on.
I haven’t. It’s likely I think about him more now that he’s dead than I really did for years beforehand and yet — I don’t regret it. We loved each other, neither of us ever stopped, but there was no returning from a conversation in a car in a park, like so many others we had, where we both acknowledged that love was not enough.
There’s a lot neither of us ever said publicly about our relationship (he kissed and told, I knew this, and was unsurprised to find it true) and a lot I never will. We spent more time alone with each other than with anyone else. (And a truly stunning amount of it in bed, both literally and figuratively, which strikes me as particularly hilarious given that we both were apparently ace. Truly a spectrum.)
I feel like I can’t write more and yet like I could go on forever. I’m probably just going to have to fictionalize it in order to work it all out, or just …accept that five years with him will continue haunting me for the rest of my life. He wasn’t my soulmate or anything like that, but we somehow managed to hit each other’s key obsession points.
It’s ten minutes to midnight and I feel like I ought to hit post before I write something I’ll somehow regret. For him, time has stopped. He’ll never see the new Doctor Who, never watch another horror movie with someone, never laugh, never run after someone. He’ll never write another story, never make another audience gasp in horror or shock or delight. His timeline ended in January.
Mine continues on, and sometimes I will think of him and sometimes be sad and sometimes be joyful.
I’m not sure this is what I meant to write, but it’s been so long since I wrote anything that I suppose it’ll have to do.
But this year Halloween happens to be on a Tuesday, and maybe that’s the right day to try to write it out. I put on one of his favorite movies and I’m just going to try to put some words together that might stand some chance of expressing how I feel and felt.
…I can feel myself trying to shut it down already, but I’ve been doing it all year, for many years, and I need to try to not. If this place is not safe, then nowhere is.
It’s odd, because I don’t exactly miss him. I don’t not miss him, in the way I always did and now, always will, but the fact of the matter is that we couldn’t actually be proper friends, afterward. …I just looked, I didn’t really write about it here (well, there) when we broke up, at least, not the day of, or directly really at all. But I miss the experience of him, the joy of him, the oversized personality in a larger than life story that he wrote for himself. The last few times I saw him (and I saw him every year until the last two) he was so diminished. He was no longer the vast being encompassing so much of time and space that I experienced, just a man, sick and sicker and small and smaller. I miss his enormity.
He died, if I noted it correctly, on the eighteenth of January, 2023, with family and friends. His body had given out. He had amputations, heart attacks, strokes, infections. Everything about him was withering. He could have held on a bit longer, struggling, and chose not to, with grace. I have this on the authority of the one who was there, who stayed, who held him up in ways I never could because I couldn’t handle the idea of seeing him die.
(There is guilt here. Do I have the right to write this? …but of course I do. Of course. At his funeral, on a friend’s goddamn birthday, they saw me and we held each other and I said “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” And they said “He loved you so damn much.” And we wept because who else would understand but someone else subjected to his love? Someone who subjected him to theirs?)
Fuck winter. I’ve known so much death in winter. Only my grandparents died in summer.
I cried a lot in the days after his death. I logged back into the book of face and read what people said about him. I logged back into the twt account we were still mutuals on and looked to see what people said about him there. I posted the twinkling motes of sorrow I felt like making public, little bubbles that didn’t touch the morass of feeling I let myself sink into. I talked about it a very little with one or two people who would understand. I pretended I’d moved on.
I haven’t. It’s likely I think about him more now that he’s dead than I really did for years beforehand and yet — I don’t regret it. We loved each other, neither of us ever stopped, but there was no returning from a conversation in a car in a park, like so many others we had, where we both acknowledged that love was not enough.
There’s a lot neither of us ever said publicly about our relationship (he kissed and told, I knew this, and was unsurprised to find it true) and a lot I never will. We spent more time alone with each other than with anyone else. (And a truly stunning amount of it in bed, both literally and figuratively, which strikes me as particularly hilarious given that we both were apparently ace. Truly a spectrum.)
I feel like I can’t write more and yet like I could go on forever. I’m probably just going to have to fictionalize it in order to work it all out, or just …accept that five years with him will continue haunting me for the rest of my life. He wasn’t my soulmate or anything like that, but we somehow managed to hit each other’s key obsession points.
It’s ten minutes to midnight and I feel like I ought to hit post before I write something I’ll somehow regret. For him, time has stopped. He’ll never see the new Doctor Who, never watch another horror movie with someone, never laugh, never run after someone. He’ll never write another story, never make another audience gasp in horror or shock or delight. His timeline ended in January.
Mine continues on, and sometimes I will think of him and sometimes be sad and sometimes be joyful.
I’m not sure this is what I meant to write, but it’s been so long since I wrote anything that I suppose it’ll have to do.
