Things just haven’t been the same since you hot shot yourself.
That awful Monday night when the needle bit you a final goodbye. Alone. Curled up inside that ramshackle Indiana motel room tacked to the shoulder of US 33. Your few belongings neatly arranged as a last courtesy. Everything in its proper place. Everything except for those last words on a page—your final temper tantrum.
It was a gibberish beyond the comprehension of most. But I understood perfectly. Because no matter the distance of our disconnect, we somehow remained tethered. At least when it came to the writing. We could read each other as easily as the riddle printed on the back of one of her hoarded banana Laffy-Taffys.
She always had that soft spot flair for tragedy that made my intellect hard. She was just wired that way; I was wired another. But we meshed well. Even when things got messy. Because we both knew how it was going to end, long before the start of that tailspin last chapter.
We just never said the words out loud.
And that unspoken admission is what makes me miss her every fucking day. And it is why I saw her memory everywhere on that birthday funeral drive west.
Back out again on 94. Heading west, before turning south. Hugging the shoreline curves of the lake’s right side. Dodging the clumped Chicago bound masses. Slipping in and out of traffic anxiously. Just an anonymous 80 m.p.h. streak chafing against the background browns of another fading Midwestern November.
It made me miss her green eyes; she was right there with me again.
I saw her ink and paint stained fingers in the skeletal trees bracketing the harvested farmland. The ones clawing up, raging against pale blue skies to reach out and caress the sorrows of all the old gods.
I felt the steady beat of her pulse underneath the tires. The ones barely maintaining a grip on concrete and asphalt arteries pumping me west. Because it seems like everything these days is slipping. And I’m powerless to stop the slide, regardless of downshifted gears.
I absorbed the breeze of her breath in the murmurations of daytime starlings as they pivoted randomly in their nonsensical trajectories. Taking their flights of fancy, like too many of our conversations often did. The ones shared as we pinballed our way through the good time of another Indiana weekend night in the before years.
I heard her voice in the music. Sang along to the symphony of our intimate melancholy. Mashing playlists to fill the time. At least until that one song queued up. The one stuck on a fifty mile loop; the one I will never play for another living soul.
And I caught glimpses of her smile in the random leaves tossing and tumbling on invisible currents. Always drifting and twirling. Sometimes down. But almost always up. Carried soft on the lake wind; destined for places I will never see. Or understand.
Until I tumble there myself one day.
Those are just some of the reasons why I had to pull over outside of Paw Paw. Because I had to get my head right before the road bent too far left. The baggage of too many years, carried over too many miles, needed rearranging. And I required that shifted stability to run the gauntlet with any chance of success.
Because I could never fully shake the idea that maybe we were actually meant to be together. And somehow just got the timing all wrong. Like a lot of the things we did. Even if we did them for all the right reasons.
I knew early on about the pills. It wasn’t until later that more hypodermic demons entered the chat. That news of failed rehabs was often carried disjointedly down a grapevine withering more and more with each passing year. And with every new funeral.
In the end, I wasn’t surprised.
When addiction runs that deep, the compulsion is too often to keep pushing shit into your brains. To dance closer to that line. Always finding the room for one more of anything that will help ease the burden of existing for just a few minutes more.
She was skilled in her crippling talents. Almost clinical. So what she did was intentional. Others have argued against that version of events. Saying she got bad stuff. Or miscalculated. Made another mistake.
But that just wasn’t her.
Even at the end of her story, there wasn’t room for her to be anything other than who she was. And she maintained that definition right until one of the best minds I have ever known flickered out soft amongst that sea of broken Indiana corn.
Alone.
And probably scared.
I wasn’t there when she needed me the most—that’s the part of the story I hate.
I don’t think the mourning will ever stop. But I do know there will be more come morning. Because the new sun will bring with it another autumn farewell; another unexpected goodbye.
Somehow, I have to make room in my heart to write that story, too. Even though it is getting more and more difficult to find the words. Especially when exhausted from running the east/west gauntlet of 94 again, just for the sake of an end of autumn birthday funeral run.
I need to get what’s left of my head bent back right.
So I’ll probably have to pull over outside of Paw Paw again. To rearrange the baggage and slip into the playlist of new songs to help boomerang me back up to that Capital City. That strange and nervous sprawl where I will wait, pacing under my rented rotunda view.
Because that next phone call is going to come.
And I’m running out of time words.
