moving steady to forget

i get caught up in thinking that things don't exist which i don't write about. they are only true if i remember them. and i will forget someday but maybe i will also read about it. it is about filling out my life. i see the years behind me and they are so formidable. i can't imagine them as true and lived because i don't remember. the more i write here, the more of my life is the truth. the more exists. even the things i don't particularly want to put into words.

a few weeks ago, a wednesday i believe, i was in the coffee shop i've come to frequent over the summer to read. it had been about a month since i left kelly for a while. four weeks, maybe a few days more. i thought it a good time to return but i didn't know what to say. thought it would be better to text, a more restrained conversational setting. we texted a little while i read and i was surprised, as i always am, at how she would tell me how much i mean to her. how she'd say i didn't fuck anything up. how she'd tell me our relationship was unconditional to her. i love that phrase, even if i don't quite understand it from her. i told her i didn't understand her, why she would continue to put up with me like she did. she wrote back that she liked me but she was "totally in love with dave."

as it happened, i saw the entire message without reading it. i looked away from my phone, quiet in my chair. held it in my hand, open. looked back to read it and looked away again. a shock, though it shouldn't have been. i hate that when i leave, especially when she's with him, that i know they will just get closer and closer. and it happened. i sat there.

i read a paragraph or two but closed my book. she texted again, saying "i'm sorry." i sat there. after a while, i discreetly packed up and moved to my car. i sat in the driver's seat facing the highway, the shop in my rearview mirror. sat with the keys in my hand and the sun setting somewhere behind an overpass. watched all the cars pass, the people arriving and leaving, milling around inside, ordering drinks. looked at my key, the little laser-cut pathway through the center. how it matched itself properly on the other side such that it didn't matter how you held it. i didn't say a word. an hour since she texted before i started the car to leave.

that happened. i didn't cry although i felt like it a lot. mostly just in shock. strange how such an abstraction of a girl. such an idea, less a warm body, could do this to me. i didn't speak to her for a week and a half. she would write me once or twice. another text. a message on aim. another a few days later. regrets she'd had. how she hated how she'd done this to us. i agree, it fucking sucks. i'm almost to blaming her instead of me. i know i'm not strong but i know the root of all evil in this post-eden is her and dave. maybe, just maybe, i deserve to be angry.

we spoke some the next weekend, just texting. i sent her a package because i didn't know how not to. she wrote me, asking me how i could send her this, which helps her through finals so much more than dave's "box of goodies" and how could i do this? and how did i know? i wrote her back simply that... you are me. it's not fair she said. hah, yeah. you think? she would vacillate it seemed. simultaneously of the idea that "i want your shoulder" and "we never had a chance." i never knew quite what to think. i hate that feeling.

that was a week and a half ago. she wrote me once asking if i thought we'd ever meet again. i didn't know i said. i thought we deserved it. i didn't mention that any meeting would likely be dictated by circumstances. that i can't see myself visiting her if she's with dave. i don't think i could handle that. she never was online anymore or writing me either. i figured for sure she's gone home. she's with dave and has forgotten all about me. i wrote her one morning. saying that remembering meeting her a few years ago was like trying semi-successfully to recall a dream and that she was so much less than a real living girl to me and that it made me sad. she wrote back simply that it was sad and maybe we'd meet someday. it made me angry. the insincerity was something awful. and maybe i shouldn't accuse her of something like that but i could feel it, immediate and painful. a response from the hip, barely considered and likely shrugged off. we haven't spoken since then.

i didn't mention but i had a dream featuring this pair a few nights ago. i was in a building in nyc. we were going to meet like we'd been dreaming of for a long time. i was nervous and she was in the next room. we were to meet very soon when i heard someone enter her room. it was dave, unexpected. he had people with him. they all retrieved instruments and began to play music. it was an easy guitar melody, like a rhythm to a song that never grew or diminished, in my dream it was simply dave's theme. i hated this and felt beaten again. i tried to escape, left the building and walked around the block but the sound followed me wherever i went. i returned to where i'd started and tried to mingle with people i knew, tried to surround myself in the friends i had, to drown myself in their conversations and attentions. around that time, i sensed people entering. it was kelly and dave, come to meet and mingle. i dropped my eyes, without a word gathered all my things and brushed past them to leave. i never once looked at them or looked back.