What isn't.* in Pandemic

When I was anticipating the breakup, but before it actually happened, I wrote him a letter. In it, I detailed all of the trips we took, the memories contained in them, because, I wrote, if we break up it will be a long, long time before I’m able to roll those memories around in my mind without it being too painful. I want you to know, I wrote, that those memories mattered. It all mattered.

This is what nobody told me would happen once the finality of the relationship sunk in: you will lose six years of your life.

I don’t mean that those years were wasted; I did a lot, learned a lot, traveled outside of North America for the first time as an adult, had crazy sexual experiences, cuddled a bunch of dogs, blew away my preconceived notions of how I could be. But most of them are inextricable from him, and anything linked to him just makes me sad now. I’m operating in this precarious place where at any moment, something will spark a memory and tip me over into sadness.

I’m in San Francisco now, only for six nights, and it’s harder than I thought it would be. It’s my first time being in the city when he’s been here, but also permanently gone. He has a new girlfriend, or at least a new “situation,” and there is something about one-sided mourning that magnifies the grief so much more than shared, if distanced, sadness.

It’s a season of layered trauma. After seven months gone and four months without visiting, I returned to city that has shrunk to only two friends, one of whom seems ambivalent about hanging out, who canceled on me at the last minute tonight. I have two other friends who live outside of the city, a distance that requires advanced planning, you know?

My brother and his wife are returning from India to their home in Boston in a month or two. They’re planning on going to Oregon to stay with my parents for a month over Christmas, and when my mother tells me this, she says that they’ll have my bedroom there. That’s fine, I think, it’s a big room and there’s two of them. But there are weird undertones when my mother talks about their visit. Finally, I venture, “I can just stay in the sewing room?” It’s a three-bedroom house, and the sewing room has a little foam couch that folds out into a bed.

She hesitates. “I told [my brother and his wife] they could use the sewing room for their office, since they both work from home.”

There won’t be room for me, is what she’s saying.

These last few days, I find myself thinking about how easy it was to slip through the cracks. To arrive fully into adulthood, to be in a big city, to have parents and a new sister-in-law, to have spent my twenties weaving through bars in four-inch heels as nameless men reached out to lightly touch my bare arms as if to say, “A moment of your time, please?” and, despite all of that, despite all the parties and all of the classes and all of the workouts and the laughter and the ridiculousness and the therapy and the casual conversations with anyone who would talk to me…how I somehow landed in a life that is marked more by what isn’t than what is.

***LONG RANTY UPDATE:
there was a long ranty update here, but it’s embarrassing, so I deleted it!

Last updated October 20, 2020