It Is What It Is

It’s strange how your childhood sort of feels like forever. Then suddenly you’re sixteen and the world becomes an hourglass and you’re watching the sand pile up at the wrong end. And you’re thinking of how when you were just a kid, your heartbeat was like a kick drum at a rock show, and now it’s just a time bomb ticking out. And it’s sad. And you want to forget about dying. But mostly you just want to forget about saying goodbye.

When thinking about life, remember this: no amount of guilt can change the past, and no amount of anxiety can change the future.

You know you’re in love when literally everything reminds you of that person. A song, a smell, a laugh, or even the weather will make that person come to mind. I can’t deny that every time something or someone reminds me of you, I fall more in love with you each time.

I can’t say loving you was easy. I can’t say it was easy like it’s easy to miss the sun during the winter and it wasn’t easy like loving the way leaves turn color in the fall. Loving you was so hard – but nothing, nothing, could compare to losing you. When you left my life it felt like you branded every inch of my heart with a different memory and then blew it to pieces. It felt like I had pieces of my obliterated heart just floating through my blood stream, and randomly - for no reason at all- some memory would make its way to my head and play behind my eyes like a movie screen. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to make it stop. Those unscheduled movie showings made my day when you left. Every single day. The worst part - the absolute worst part of it all, though, was that if you had told me you wanted me back - if you had decided that suddenly my love was enough? Well. I would’ve dropped to my knees and stuck tape between my teeth and pieced every inch of my heart back together for you. I would’ve shoved my heart back into your arms and asked with tears in my eyes- God, please, please, make it better. I couldn’t bear to live my life through a movie that I didn’t know how to play the part for anymore.

Not to mention, ours was the last generation that grew up with all those bright promises of “work hard, go to college, and you’ll have a successful life,” only to find those hopes abruptly dashed when the housing bubble burst. Milliennials have grown up expecting that disappointment, because for them, the problem has been there since Day One.

It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the sound I heard when I was 9 and my father slammed the front door so hard behind him I swear to god it shook the whole house. For the next 3 years I watched my mother break her teeth on vodka bottles. I think she stopped breathing when he left. I think part of her died. I think he took her heart with him when he walked out. Her chest is empty, just a shattered mess or cracked ribs and depression pills. It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s all the blood in the sink. It’s the night that I spent 12 hours in the emergency room waiting to see if my sister was going to be okay, after the boy she loved, told her he didn’t love her anymore. It’s the crying, and the fluorescent lights, and white sneakers and pale faces and shaky breaths and blood. So much blood. It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the time that I had to stay up for two days straight with my best friend while she cried and shrieked and threw up on my bedroom floor because her boyfriend fucked his ex. I swear to god she still has tear streaks stained onto her cheeks. I think when you love someone, it never really goes away. It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the six weeks we had a substitute in English because our teacher was getting divorced and couldn’t handle getting out of bed. When she came back she was smiling. But her hands shook so hard when she held her coffee, you could see that something was broken inside. And sometimes when things break, you can’t fix them. Nothing ever goes back to how it was. I got an A in English that year. I think her head was always spinning too hard to read any essays. It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s that I do.