I love you still

We were twenty-six, heading into Saturn return. My father had just died and I was mad with grief. You courted me by giving me the first page of your first journal; I found it folded on my pillow, and fell in love with your ten-year-old cursive. Still new to each other and infinitely possible, we ran down the gleaming spine of a mountain under the full moon, holding hands. I taught you how to spell lichen. You taught me how to hug a girl with my whole body. Our dates were never just with each other; our friends surrounded our wild hunger like kind trees. For awhile, this saved us. The music was loud and the drugs were strong and the party was everywhere. We became glittering galaxies in each other’s arms. We danced and cried and cried and danced, and wrote until our hands were lightning. Sometimes our poetry exploded all hope, and I couldn’t find my way through the ghosts, and I knew I should run and keep running. Sometimes our poetry was a home I wanted to live in forever. I made you peanut butter and lettuce sandwiches since they were my favourite when I was little, and you taught me your mother’s recipe for roasted brussel sprouts.

A few nights ago you were in my dream and we were still running down that mountain, still holding hands, and then we stopped and I hugged you softly, and now I know that you were saying goodbye. I will never forget your body curled against mine, how your tears made my chest ache. I wanted to be so much wiser and stronger than I was. I wanted to protect you from everything that had ever or would ever hurt you. 

I have not slept since you died. I fall asleep, and then an hour or two later I wake up, and the night becomes a lonely ceremony with the terrible electricity of your death at the center, a black mouth sucking my dreams into strange patterns. God I loved you. Maybe you loved me. We were terrible together, but sometimes we slipped beyond gravity and the stars reached for us like they needed us. I was careening and lost; I had no father. Grief had sucked all the air out of my body and left me like a fish that couldn’t breathe on a shore that made no sense. You were like no one I had known, a boygirl made of crushed diamonds and wildflower honey, and webs of wounds you wore like backwards armor. You told me everything that was wrong about me. I tried too hard, and trying made me ugly. Let me be your champion I begged, but anyone could see I was an orphan not a champion, with a shield made of holes and a weed for a sword.

But one night when the drugs made us wonderful you wrote a list of the things you loved about me that reached from the ceiling to the floor. I answered with a list that wrapped around the room. Even now, you are teaching me. Of course you can’t sleep, Tata, I hear you say. You’re still hiding everything you write instead of giving it away. So here I am, Andrea. I’m still listening to you, my face as hot and wet as it was after our arguments. I’m still getting up out of the tangle of my blankets, where I’ve been tossing in the undertow of all that’s unresolved in my orphaned soul, crouching in the dark to give these words away at 3:30 am, because you’re telling me to. Even though I’m still as scared as I was then. Even though it’s useless, crying these tears into the wind.

I loved you, and sometimes you loved me, didn’t you? Being with you was a revelation. Your touch woke parts of me that had been dormant for so long I forgot they existed. When our relationship ended I went crazy. I almost died in a hundred different ways. I moved out of the house we shared, and spent my nights on friends’ couches. Sleep was impossible then too. But one time when I was house-sitting for a friend, feeling more alone than I had ever been, I heard you knock. When I opened the door you weren’t there, but on the ground, wrapped and tied with a ribbon, was a peanut butter and lettuce sandwich.

You remembered everything. And I will never forget you.

I love you Andrea, I love you still, I love you still.

I love you always.