Days are easy, until they’re hard
I wrote that not-incredibly-remarkable sentence last breakup. I’m pretty sure I’ve said it this breakup too.
Let’s just say that things were going so well. I was excited to graduate, excited to move in with my friend and her husband, excited to see what post-grad Lauren is like. Now, I have–what? I have the experience. I have my quiet little life that, in all honesty, is pretty great. I make my own hours; I have the privacy and community I need. But I still have this hollowness, this pain that creeps up my arms and makes my heart cave in.
I still miss him, oh God. I keep having these flashes of memories that make me HUNGER for him. (That time, oh gosh, years ago, when we drove around Matthews, Indiana, and sat by some old creek he used to visit as a kid. Or the times we would go to Southside Diner and smoke cigarettes for five hours, talking. Or the time we went to my uncle’s soup and chili dinner, and we looked out into the lake till it got dark. (I’m still not sure how I convinced him to go all this way with me, to Columbia City, where he could meet my dad and my uncles for the first time.))
I think about that scene in Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, where the hross tells Ransom that memory is a part of the lifecycle of love. “A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.” And this is the stuff of poetry.
All of that seems like bullshit, complete and utter bullshit. Memories are good only when right now is good. I hold on to those memories, bless them, only because I want to relive them. I’m not okay with them just being part of the past. That’s not good enough. (Memories, I think, propel us into hope. But my hope doesn’t lie in some wishy-washy “oh, everything will be alright one day” future. My hope is in returning to my lover, the only one I want to be with. But when is hope good and when is hope delusional?)
Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there was
A time when it was not.It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
-Emily Dickinson
July 5, 2014