angel of the morning

You imagine this is the moment most people would try to find religion—or, at least, something like it. Something that gives them a purpose—the reason they get out of bed.

Try as you might, you can’t come up with a reason why you do.

You watch the highway disappear under your tires as you go about a day as mundane as any other, held up by tasks that someone has to complete, and so you do. You understand that not many people find their life’s purpose on the way to Walmart, but surely most people feel…something. Surely they look at the horizon of their life and notice goals or desires or dreams. Surely not everyone is just floating day to day living their life while waiting for…something.

You aren’t sure what.

Part of you believes it’s a decision to be made, but you aren’t sure where you find it or how you make it or who presents it to you.

You switch lanes.

You used to have a purpose—or, at least, daydreams of a purpose.

You think of the hours you spent imagining a world where he meant what he said when he gave you that ring. You think of holidays and dinners and forts for watching movies. The world where he loved you.

You can almost feel the bile rising in your throat.

Your body wants to shake him out—the saddest etch-a-sketch in the world. It wants to purge the good, the silly, the funny. All the good things get stuck in your throat, trapped behind the knot that never goes away, that spends all its time reminding you that you should hate him.

You manage it sometimes, when you feel particularly strong.

Other times, he makes a special point to get popcorn from the hotel lobby for a movie night and you fold like a cheap lawn chair in the wind—like you always have.

Pathetic.

On other occasions, he sees a military plane fly overhead and tells you its exact type. Not that you particularly care, but you enjoy that he wants to tell you. You enjoy being his person. Enjoyed.

You think you may throw up in the laundry detergent aisle.

And, anyway, what are you supposed to do with all this? What do people do with this? You build a world with someone you've known half your life, and, slowly, you realize you have to leave it. What—you're saying people just put on their space suit and step outside? You lose the love of your life and you're expected to colonize Mars?

Who are you kidding?

You'd much rather—if you ever manage to leave him, which, your track record is abysmal, if you're honest—lay down in your apartment, where every inch reeks of him, let it grow over you like...moss. You don’t want to forget the way he rolled on top of you—entirely too close to be comfortable, but lovely nevertheless—in the middle of the night like his very being missed you. You don’t want to forget the way he made you laugh at everything and nothing. You want to be swallowed by it.

Besides, this city is covered in memories the pair of you have made. Wouldn't it be easier to accept that? Turn it into an altar, or a shrine, and keep moving, keep getting out of bed?

You think of his parents’ home as you load groceries into your trunk. You think of endless errands to buy cat food—worse, you think of the cat—cats, actually. Animals you'll never see again—a small, soft creature who has decided to love you, and, what, you just never come back? How is that fair to anyone?

You think of his parents—how kind and welcoming they've always been. How, maybe you felt slightly on the outside of their unit, but, sure, okay, they've been a family for 30 years. Whatever. But, you never felt unwanted. They invited you. They thought of you. You think of homemade pies and warm family dinners and holidays you'll spend alone.

You climb into the driver's seat once again, pull out of the parking lot, onto the highway, feeling like something is sitting on your chest.

It’s dark out by the time you get home.

You look at the windows of your apartment, lit up, even still. You know Clark is inside. You know he's watching something or playing a game—alive, aware.

Waiting.

You imagine, instead, coming back to an empty apartment, to dark windows. You think of how scared you are of the dark, of being alone. And, sure, that’s not a reason to stay with someone—and it isn’t the only reason you’re still here, but isn't it? Isn’t it part of it? Holding on, desperately, to a world where you can exhale when you walk in the front door—not sit up, watching, waiting for…something. You don’t know what. You only know that if you’re awake, it won’t find you. And, isn’t it better, really, to have a witness? To your life? To the mundane? To know there’s another person outside while you take a shower? To not have to rush through it, terrified, and open the shower curtain with trepidation?

Pathetic.

You shake your head, open your front door, and immediately Clark is there, ushering bags from your hands into his own.

“Anything good in here?” Clark asks. “I’ve been dying for some snacks.” He glances at you over his shoulder. “The cabinets are bleak.” He’s grinning, teasing, and you want to run out the door, find a field to scream in.

“Have I ever let you down?” You ask instead.

He shakes his head. “Never, darlin'”

Sometimes—not often—his Kansas, corn-fed, country boy accent pops out—when he’s excited, when he’s tired, when he loves you.

You swallow around the lump in your throat, find your way to the couch. You know since you bought them, he’ll put them away. It's happened a thousand times before.

“That’s what I thought.”

You watch him move around the kitchen, almost reverent, memorizing. There’s a world where you find your voice, tell him the words you can’t say out loud, even to yourself. But, it’s not this world—not this night.

Have you ever known something was ending as it was happening? Have you ever seen the end coming and been powerless to do anything but lay down on the tracks, wait for the train?

You watch his ever-graying hair catch the light in the pizza restaurant you’ve been coming to since you were teenagers—when graying hair and turning 30 were pieces on a chessboard that didn’t belong to either of you—and you see all the dreams you’ve ever dreamt flash by like lightning.

You can almost hear the crack of it.

He tells a joke and you laugh, though you know you’ll never hear his laugh again. How can you stand at a funeral and smile? How can you hold a secret that nobody else knows? How do you stop it from bursting through your chest?

“Do you want to get ice cream after this?”

You smile, nod, as if the world isn’t spinning on an entirely new axis, as if gravity hasn’t lost its hold on you. “Sure.”

You spend the rest of the night pretending.

It feels like a strange kind of performance, like you’ve been handed a script nobody else has read except you. You feel like a circus clown and nobody gets the joke—nobody sees the cavern we’re all about to fall into.

You laugh at the right moments. You answer questions. You let the evening continue because what else are you supposed to do? There is no alarm that sounds when a life changes, no glowing red signal that lets you know the world you know is ending. No announcement that the person sitting across from you is suddenly someone you will have to learn how to live without.

There is only a pizza restaurant. There is only ice cream melting slowly in a cup between your hands. There is only him, smiling at you like the ground beneath both of you hasn’t shifted.

Maybe that’s the cruelest part.

He doesn’t know.

The boy you danced with at two proms, the boy you taught to drive a car when he got tired of being the only one without his license, the boy that spent a whole day making you feel loved when he decided he wanted you forever and gave you a ring to prove it—you’re going to hurt him.

You look at him and think about all the versions of yourself that exist because of him. You wonder if he knows how many small pieces of you are scattered throughout him. The jokes only the two of you understand. The routines nobody else would notice. The memories that wouldn’t exist if he hadn’t been standing there beside you.

How do you separate two lives that have grown around each other for so long?

How do you take something woven together and pull it apart without tearing your soul along with it?

You don’t know.

So, you let him drive you home.

You do what people have always done when the world changes and refuses to wait for them to catch up. You close the door. You turn off the lights. You crawl into the same bed you’ve shared for years.

And for a moment, your body forgets.

Your head finds the nook of his chest you’ve spent countless nights tucked into, his arm drapes around your shoulders, fingers dancing over your skin.

If it wasn’t so dramatic, you’d give into the desire to go lay down in traffic. You’d let the world move around you for a while, instead of dragging you along with it. But, besides, you don’t want to be dead. You want the days to stop barreling towards you. You want the decision you know you have to make to just…sit—for a while—on the back burner. You want to let it simmer instead of choking the life out of you day after day.

But, life keeps going. It never stops. You’d almost call it motion sickness.

You could be okay alone, you think. People do it every day. And, isn’t there a quote somewhere about…what is it? If we’re all alone then we’re together in that too—anyway, something like that. Perhaps that would offer some comfort if you felt like zooming out and pondering the notion of the human condition while standing in the grocery line, but all you really want is him and no platitude in the world can solve that.

There’s another one—you were someone before him. And, sure, of course that’s true. But, it really isn’t if you met him when you were fourteen. If you meet the love of your life that young, everything you’ve ever been has been tied up with him. You’ve grown together—never apart.

What do you do then? When all the things you are have something to do with the person you must lose? How do you make coffee? How do you make toast? How do you walk down the street? How do you sit with yourself, alone, in a world they don’t inhabit any longer?

You imagine going to the grocery store—sure, you’ve done that alone before, you’re a full grown adult. But, who would choose that when there’s a world where you laugh over soda quantities and someone cares about whether you find your favorite chips and you always wander the toy aisles because making the other laugh is a language you’re both fluent in and you take every opportunity.

He moves out on a Tuesday. You help him fold his clothes into the duffel bag he bought after graduation—imagining grand adventures.

Back then, the bag had been a promise. A symbol of all the places you thought you would go, all the versions of yourselves you thought you would become. It sat in the corner of closets waiting for a life that felt bigger than the one either of you were currently living.

You never imagined it would be used for this.

You fold his shirts the way you always have, smoothing wrinkles out of fabric that will no longer end up in your drawers. You pack the small things that somehow became his without either of you deciding. The charger. The toiletries. The sweatshirt you always stole and he always pretended to be annoyed about.

You catch sight of his face out of the corner of your eye—his perfect, perfect face, the one that no longer belongs to you. Tears roll down his cheeks in gentle little tracks, like he’s too shocked to let it hit him all at once. You’ve seen him do it before, compartmentalize to get through a moment.

You try very hard not to think about later, him crashing on a friend’s couch and his lovely shoulders shaking with sobs you can’t comfort him through.

You’ll never run your fingers through his curls again.

There is something unbearable about how normal it all is.

A person can leave your life one item at a time.

A toothbrush disappears. A pair of shoes is gone from the doorway. A jacket no longer hangs over the back of a chair.

When he’s gone, you notice the empty spaces where he was, take in the patchwork of your apartment after he’s been removed.

It makes your stomach twist.

Days later, you stand next to a half empty grocery cart and stare at toy Transformers. You can hear him in your head on another day, in another life.

A life you don't live in anymore.

You don’t touch them. Instead, you put your hands on the cart like maybe that will stop your knees from going out from under you, and push it forward.

You don’t buy his favorite cereal. You think of the last box he touched still sitting in the kitchen, going stale—if cereal full of artificial colors ever could.