I saw your car parked on some random street as I dropped off my son at his volunteer job. It’s been years, more than a decade, but my knees went weak when I saw the car. I recognized the stickers, but, really, I know what that car looks like better than I know most things. You probably don’t even own it anymore; who knows. Nonetheless, seeing it sent me careening through the past. For years, so many bad decisions followed seeing that car. Probably the worst decisions I’ve ever made. Things that make my soul shrink in on itself in shame. Things that make me wish I was a different person. I loved you, I think. I was full of emotion, but it's hard to know if that emotion was love. At the time, I was consumed with my idea of you. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to not have my heart full of you. After it was over, I still thought about you every day for years; if it wasn’t love it was still one of the strongest emotions I have ever felt. Even now I remember exactly what your shoulder looked like; the sound of disappointment in your voice; your hedging.
But was it love? You father died when you were young. I do the math and when we were together it was not the far off in the past. And how could something like that be in the past anyway? What did I really know about what you went through with your father’s death? What you carried with you? What you laid to rest and what you didn’t? I don’t know anything. I didn’t ask. I didn’t care enough about you as something other than the idea I created in my mind to ask you about your father and to listen to what you said. That wasn’t love. In those days I would see your car, and I would spiral into what I called love but was really an illusion meant to mask my own emptiness.
I began thinking about writing this because of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero.” When she repeats “It’s me, hi” the third time in the triplet in the middle of the song, the affect in her voice sounded so familiar. It reminded me of you and I seeing each other again after some debacle that should have ended the relationship but didn’t. That flat, resigned “hi” that I have heard more than once in your voice. I should have walked away from you. You should have walked away from me.
But the song that makes the most sense is Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers.” Her voice, the timbre and smoke of it, conveys so much. Sometimes relationships must end because they have gone far enough or because they don’t give enough or because we are better off without them. We held on to each other longer than we should have. We held on to each other even after doing so only made things worse. The last time we saw each other, months after our last breakup, was in the bathroom line in a bar that I had introduced you to but never expected to see you in. By the time I came out of the bathroom you were gone. I am grateful you did that because I probably would have gone on prolonging the thing we had, which was not love but was something anyway.
