It was, for all intents and purposes, our last night together. At least, our last night guaranteed together. Tomorrow we would drive into Seattle, to my new home, and I didn’t know if he would stay once we got there. I didn’t even know where his final stop was, or what it was that he “needed to see.” I only knew it was somewhere in Washington, and that I’d had the time of my life on this journey with him, and now it was ending, and I didn’t want to lose him.
I pressed my fingers hard into my temples, massaging the muscle there, my eyes closed as I tried to find the easy answer that eluded me. But there was no easy answer, no simple solution, and as sick as it made me feel reaching a hand out until I felt that leather binding, I couldn’t stop myself.
I was an addict, fiending for comfort from his words, chasing the high that came from finding a new layer of him buried in those pages.
Pulling the book into my lap, I ran my hand over the page bookmarked, the entry he was writing last night before bed. Kalo put a paw on the pages with a whine, as if to tell me to reconsider, but I’d already had the first taste. There was no turning back now.
I remember the first time a girl told me she loved me.
It was Melissa Rickman, and we were seniors in high school. She told me she loved me after we’d been dating for a little over a month. I just stared at her before finally asking, “Why?”
That night, I talked to my dad about it, and I asked him to tell me how he knew he loved Mom. He’d sat on the edge of my bed with this far off look in his eyes and this goofy ass smile. He told me there was one night where Mom invited him over to her apartment because she wanted to cook a meal for him.
But she was an awful cook, he’d told me, which didn’t surprise me since she still is. He said watching her try to make a meal for him was the most endearing thing. He said she was making something so simple, a pasta dish, but the sauce was all over her apron and splatted on her face.
He said at one point, she’d given up, placing her hands on the counter and hanging her head as she started to cry. All she’d wanted was to do something special for him.
Dad said in that moment, he knew he loved her.
It was nothing crazy, nothing she said or did that really stood out, just seeing her standing there with pasta sauce on her face and tears in her eyes. He loved her. It hit him simply and without fuss, and he didn’t tell her until a full six months later.
I told Melissa Rickman the next day that I didn’t love her, and she broke up with me, which was fine.
I’ve written about love in this journal before today, always with the firm belief that it didn’t really exist. I’ve always believed it was a fantasy, something we cling to as humans to make this world a little less lonely. Because it is fucking lonely.
But tonight, I walked with Cooper in downtown Grants Pass, and we were just talking and drinking hot chocolate and looking at Christmas lights when she tripped a little. She spilled hot chocolate on her scarf, and her little face crumpled at the sight of it. She was so devastated by that splash of brown on her otherwise blue scarf, and I found it so fucking adorable that all I could do was laugh and pull her into me and kiss her. I mean physically, there was nothing else I could have done in that moment. I couldn’t not kiss her.
And I’m not saying it’s love, but it made me think of my dad, and my mom, and that damn pasta sauce.
I’m not saying it’s love, but it was something… different. Foreign. Intense.
I smiled, biting my lip as I traced those words with my fingertips before moving on.
I haven’t said a word to her since that moment, because as soon as her lips left mine, I remembered that Seattle is just seven hours away. I remembered that our trip is ending soon… mine in a very different way than hers.
I’ve deceived her. I’ve hidden the truth from her, afraid of how she might take it, of how it might break her, of how it might break me, too.
But if nothing has changed, if the plan remains the same, I have to tell her soon.
Or walk out of her life like a ghost.
Which is better — to tell her the truth, or forever let her wonder?
That is what plagues me tonight.
My stomach dropped as I finished the entry, fingers already flying back through the pages to find something more. I’d gone in with the intention of feeling connected to him, of finding reassurance until Emery came back to me. But all I’d found was a new source of anxiety, a new reason to question everything.
What was he hiding?
Could he really just leave me, just… ghost me, as he’d put it? What was his plan, to tell me he would be back, only to leave me without the intention of ever seeing me again?
Thoughts tumbled over themselves in my mind as I flipped, back and back, looking for something, though I didn’t know what. When I flipped past a worn page, one that was dogeared in the right-hand corner just enough to look out of place, I paused. I think I knew right then, in that moment, on that bed as the snow fell quietly outside that I was about to find answers to questions I never meant to ask, answers never meant to be found.
I flipped back to the marked page, eyes glancing at the date before focusing in on the first sentence.
Grams died today.
A shiver sped down my spine, from neck to lower back, the snow suddenly seeming like it was falling inside of me instead of outside the window. There were dried tear stains on the pages, blurring some of the ink. He’d cried when he’d written it, or perhaps when he’d read it, or maybe even both.
I couldn’t imagine Emery crying at all.
I steeled a breath, blinking my eyes a few times before I continued reading.
Grams died today.
I wrote that sentence three hours ago and then I walked away, because writing it makes it real, and of all the things I wish weren’t true, that sentence is at the top of the list.
It’s like a knife has been jabbed into my throat, the blade rusty and dull, and now I have to somehow learn to breathe with it there. I can’t remove it, can’t shove it in farther to finish the job — I just have to exist with an infected wound, with a clogged airway and a constant reminder of the loss of what was.
She’s gone. She’s never coming back. And I’m still here.
Mom and Dad know I’m not okay. They didn’t even want me to go in to see her at the end of it all, when she was literally on the welcome mat of Death’s door, but I pushed past them and forced my way in. I had to see her one more time, had to hold her hand while she crossed over.
She didn’t even look like Grams on that hospital bed, her body frail and weak, all the machines hooked into her. Her organs were failing her, one by one, for no other reason than that she was tired. Life had been long and she was tired.
Grams asked me for something.
She told me she understood how I felt, which I already knew. She was the only one who ever understood my depression, who ever empathized because she, too, battled with it. She’d been my war buddy, the one I could swap stories with to feel a little less alone. But on that bed, with her hand in mine, she asked me to take a trip.
She wants me to get in my car and take a road trip across the country. She mentioned a few spots she wants me to hit, one of them being an old diner in Mobile, Alabama, where she and Gramps stopped once. She said he ordered the steak and eggs, and being there with him was one of those moments when she loved being alive, when she looked at him and felt it in soul, in her heart, that she was meant to be there with him. Another stop she wants me to make is at a healing institute in California, and there are a few other miscellaneous spots along the way.