A Mark To Judge By

I can't believe it has only been a year. Thinking of her is ancient thing. It has been with me for a very long time. I remember the last night we spent together -- the night before the accident. I remember a week, ages ago, in a hospital room with an audience of tubes and needles. I remember being told to "let go." I remember how foreign the notion of her death was. I remember contemplating what made a person alive. I remember denying the truth. I remember seeing her lungs rise and fall though I was repeatedly being told that she, her mind, soul, was gone. I remember waking up thousands of times and dialing her number hopelessly. I remember emptiness, numbness, abandonment. I remember speaking about hope and optimism at her funeral, feeling shame at my hypocrisy at the same time. I remember hating God, but not denying Him.

I fell in love with Elizabeth Williams in the middle of the night on a hill. Melissa and Dan were there too, but they're blurry shapes in my memory. They are made spectres by the focus of my thoughts. There is scant room for them in my recollections of the twilight. I've never gone back there. When I go to Melissa's house I avoid looking in that direction. I have not been up to her house since. I barely keep in touch with her family. It's not that I want to forget or ignore anything -- it's the nature of the effect it has on me. It's not like the pain of a burn or a shock. It's a pain that settles in to me, sinks down into my muscles, and wedges between my joints and bones. It weighs me down. Breathing becomes an intense, focus-requiring chore. It feels like my body is trying to suffocate itself. It frustrates me more than I can effectifely articulate that I'm not strong enough to think about past memories and feel happy about them. I want to think about all the past memories and be overcome with a feeling of bliss, not of anger or selfishness. Instead I focus on what is lost, what I'll never have, what used to be and can't breathe.

I don't claim to understand what happens. The more courageous of my friends have asked me what I thought about the accident, but I have no answers. I want some answers, but I have come to the slow, grinding conclusion that there are no answers, not worldy ones. It should be so easy for me to wrap up that era of my life. In her own subtle way she prepared me for a future without her:

“If we, one, don’t work out, two, we work out and I die, three, I become a complete and total…I want you to move on. Really. I need you to accept that we might not always be together. And life is just so beautiful, all the time, and I don’t want you to miss out on any of it. And I don’t want you to be alone. I want you to do everything you want to and if I’m in the way of what you want, that’s okay with me. You can leave. Everyone has a certain amount of time in their life, and maybe the time isn’t that much."

But it is simply not acceptable. I have been writing a novel, essentially, about everything, but I am not prepared to show it to anyone at this point in my life because of what it says about me, and because of what it says about her. It is getting harder to write. My memories are fading rapidly. I fear that someday I'll remember her name and little else. So much is recorded in letters and journal entries -- and there are enough objects to trigger shards of events, but someday, I fear, those words will not connect to memories, just words. And words alone are very insufficent items.

We used to eat lunch every day in the courtyard, a lot of us, on an extremely feminine-coloured Mexican blanket last year. The year before that, in the Spring when I was first starting to get to know her, we ate out in the courtyard as well. I have a lot of memories from those afternoons, some of the faces change, but they were memorable times. I remember everyone always talking about how we should date and we'd just smile and laugh and go back to whatever we were doing. Little did I know, although she told me about a year later over cheesecake, that Melissa had bet her a dollar that she couldn't get me. I still laugh when I think about that long of a relationships having its routes in a financial transaction. It didn't occur to me until the last day of school that I couldn't wait until September to see her again, so I finally did something about it.

It would be dishonest for me to say I'm not bitter about some of the things that happened, but those afternoons were happy times, some of the memories I can smile about. At least there's that.

"If it means anything to you these days…I love you right now. And that won’t change. You’ll have that little right now forever."