loved

It was just a tiny notepad. Cardboard backing torn off. Cutesy blue cover torn off. I write little illegible lines, draw swirly doodles, sometimes.

Couple days prior I pulled it out from my breast pocket and began the sacred process of Monologue, reading dated selves and smirking aptly. Botched lines of poetry, outlines for stories I still mull over. Abstract bullshit. Observations. Bleeding heart forest for the trees haranguing.

Everyone says I look older, if only I could act it. You know, she told me I wasn't handling it like a man. I gulped my tears back for a moment and acted indignant. Told her, "How dare you?"

And it wasn't as if she was wrong, it was just wrong that she brought it up--that she had to pull that card. But she did and she had me. Big Baby Johann takes the stage.

It is just hard for me cause I didn't have a choice.

I have always had the delusion that if I'd ever had a gun pointed to my head I'd fight back. I am not a very co-operative person when there are not evident choices. I deserve choices, right? So I demand choices. Plead for choices.

Am left mourning the lack of choices.

Is that what makes the pain worse? Mourning the death of option as well as the actual loss? I mean my delusion of me being able to bear hug the things I love has been shot time and time again and fuck if I can let go of that either. Things always seem to wiggle free or just fall apart.

Like, you know, the shabby little notebook. And its fine. I tell myself its fine.

In this notebook, the pages hedge off, fall out, disappear. I never really cared about hording my writing. I only care about revisiting it here and there--keeping tabs on myself. I scan through the doodles, words, get flashbacks to the when and wheres.

And in epic folly there's this little epic page with the words glimmered and shimmered the time I wrote them. I showed them to her--she smiled and we held each other close and kissed. We were on a plan to San Francisco to visit the schools she was thinking about going. I meant them... meant those words with it all--everything. Whole embrace, whole gaze. She had it all from me.

I am sitting next to a stranger on the BART heading to the same city. Without her. And not to see her. I read those words and it strikes terror within me because I have been lost without the beacon of those words. The comfort, the safety, the beauty--gone, gone, gone.

I shuffle for my pen and just added the letter 'd' to the end of love and sighed a sigh of bewildering acceptance to the unfathomable. I left everything else the same.

And what else is there to say?

I loved Sarah Taylor.