I love you still

You were my first girlfriend but I was not your first, so we were always out of balance. We were twenty-six, heading into Saturn return. My father had just died a horrible death 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 careful childhood cursive, and gave you the first page of mine in return. We ate drugs that turned us into cascades of glittering light with gritty jaws, and danced and cried and cried and danced, and you read me poetry that exploded my heart, and led me home to my voice.

Early on, when we were still new to each other and infinitely possible, we ran down the gleaming shoulders of a mountain under the full moon, holding hands. 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 understand that you were saying goodbye. I will never forget your body curled against mine, how my chest ached when you cried, how 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 an hour or two later I wake up and the night becomes a lonely ceremony with the mystery of death at the center. God I loved you. Sometimes you loved me. We were terrible together, it’s true, but sometimes we slipped beyond gravity and the stars reached for us like they needed us. I was careening in the void of loss and you were like no one I had known, a boygirl made of crushed diamonds and meadows of wildflowers and wounds that had become walls I couldn’t get through, no matter how much I howled outside your window.

You wrote a list of the things you loved about me that reached from the ceiling to the floor. I wrote 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, still listening to you, my face as hot and wet as it was after our arguments, getting up out of the tangle of my blankets, where I’ve been tossing like a pebble in the tides for hours, 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 that it’s useless, to cry these tears into the wind.

I loved you and sometimes you loved me. Being with you was a revelation that had nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the way your touch woke up parts of me that had been dormant for so long I forgot they existed. When our relationship ended I went crazy in a way that I had never done before, and have not done since, a crazy that was the culmination of my father’s death and our break-up and the world going to war and the end of hope and old Saturn demolishing everything that had ever held me. I moved out of the house we shared, and spent my nights on friends’ couches, and sleep was as impossible then as it is now. But one time when I was house-sitting for a friend, feeling more alone than I had ever been, I heard you knock at the door. When I opened it you weren’t there, but on the ground, wrapped and tied with a ribbon, was a peanut butter and lettuce sandwich. I had told you that was my favourite sandwich when I was little. You remembered everything.

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