Where You Left Me

Dearest Carter,

You died three months ago. Boom. Gone. Snap. Just like that, I swear. Three months. It seems like so long when you write it down and so short when you live it. Three months is the longest time I have gone without speaking to you since the day we met. It feels like a lifetime ago, the day we met. Kings, centuries, revolutions ago. Do you remember it? The day we met, I mean. Can you still feel it and taste it and touch it? You were so beautiful in life. So full and strong and warm. You were so beautiful you broke my heart a thousand times over.

Did I ever break your heart? God. There’s so many things I want to ask now that I never wondered about while you were living. Why is that? Why does death make us curious? Did you feel beautiful and full and warm? Did you feel invincible, indestructible? Did dying hurt? And more than a superficial hurt. Did dying hurt your soul, your pride? Did it break what life couldn’t touch for all your strength?

Is it beautiful? What happens after? Is it white and silver and gold? I love you enough that I hope your death was beautiful. Because for me it was just sad. Worse than sad, devastating. For me, it broke what life could not.

I actually decided today was the day because today is your birthday. In three months I will be older than you, for the first time. I guess the worst part is that I will continue when you will not. I will see another sunrise, I will age. In three months I’ll be older than and you’ll be six months dead. It hurts to think of. Too much hurt, too sharp and blinding. I can’t think of it, but I must.

I love you Carter. But I cannot stop living because you did. I cannot be this hurt for all of my days. I cannot let my birthday upset me. And this does not mean that I love you any less, it just means that I will continue. Even when I’m happy again I will love you. Love, I think is maybe even stronger than death. Do you think that? Do you still love me? I like to think that you do. Still love me.

Maybe that’s why I’m writing. More than moving on, this is my love song to you. This could be more about remembering than continuing. It hurts all the same.

But, I want to write it down. Our love. I want to carve it in paper and pen. I want to look at it and bleed it and feel it. I want to know that it was real. Every second of it.

I will never compare our love to stars in the sky. Our love was not like that. Stars in the sky are intangible. They are distant and cold and dead, they do not feel, they explode and die. They are impossible. Our love was like blades of grass. Grass, which is real and tangible and alive. It lives, grows, breathes. You can feel it under your toes in the summer, you can pull it up and eat the tips of it and feel the dirt beneath it. The dirt which is also living, or rather, full of living things. Earth. Real, sturdy and underfoot, that is our love. Count every blade of grass on the earth and that is how much I will love you and have loved you. So I’m sorry if you do not love blades of grass the way I do. I’m sorry if you would rather be stars in the sky, but you are already too far away for me to compare you to something that is impossible.

Our story though, now that is impossible. Our story, together, the two of us. And I do not care if it does not need to be written, because I will write it regardless. And I guess really I am not doing this for you or us, but rather for me. And I do not want to tell a story about stars in the sky. I do not want to tell a story about your death. Oh God no. I want to tell a story about your life. I want to tell you the story you already know because I choose to tell it.

Yours,
Eliza.