un nouveau riche

Since you, my life has been a novel written in reverse. I'm steadily unraveling every thread of my life so that I can reweave a more comfortable blanket.

Also, I'm on a manhunt.

For myself, mostly. I need to find the person I was before you. I need to find the answers to the mysteries of my life. It's a tedious process, for the quilt is tightly woven, and the knots are tough to undo. But I know that the knots usually hold some important clues: a bit of advice not taken; the impact of the girl's fist on your thigh; the crack in your voice when you said, "that hurt, but not as much as I've hurt you emotionally, so it's okay." There were Monday night trips to the record store that the girl wasn't invited to. The lost scarf she gave you for Christmas. Your girlfriend named Desiree.

I have collected many fragments of my old life, too. There were friends - these were the first knots that I undid and the freshest wounds in my disintegrating memory. That girl wasn't ready to lose you and definitely wasn't ready to lose her friends to you. There was art, too. The girl had a notebook full of poems written for you. Memories of paintings that hang on your wall now. I know that they hang there - I've seen them. They are familiar paintings, but still look as though they were a stranger's ideas.

Of course, I have to backtrack in chronological order. I have to go through the end to get to the beginning. The viscosity of the tears running down the girl's face when she saw the photographs of you kissing another girl; the tension in your eyes at the concert. Then, some clues of a lighter tone: a memory of the texture of a stone I threw at the window next to the couch you slept on; the slick skin over the bumps of your vertebrae when you stepped out of the shower.

I still can't find her. She is as elusive as Whitey Bulger most days, and perhaps this is because she doesn't want to be found. Perhaps I am not meant to know her the way I used to. A college ruled notebook. Blue hair dye. A navy blue Nissan Sentra. It has come to my attention that she might not even exist anymore, and may never exist again.

But still I will search for her. If she is in fact dead I will hunt until I find her tombstone, probably left turned over in a forgotten cemetery overlooking a railroad. I don't know what I will do when I find that stone, whether I will cut the grass around it or simply leave her to decay.

Because, I suppose, sometimes, knowing where we end and where someone else begins is the only closure we really need.




with love and squalor,
ekw