The Ghosts Of Those Who Loved Us

“I don’t know why I’m crying,” I thought as I stood in my foyer, staring down at the birthday StitchFix box, a necklace in my hands, my tearstained face half-visible in the mirror.

White buds dangled from my ears, playing “Our Time” on repeat from Steven Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. A song I hadn’t listened to in perhaps a year, from a musical that moves backwards in time from the destruction of decades’-long friendships through to this song, where the people we watched hurt each other meet for the first time, in innocence, possibility, excitement, and joy. The instant, as Lewis says in The Four Loves, that:

Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…”

I put down the necklace and looked around the foyer. Not much had changed since I first moved in six years ago: the same ratty chair, the wooden sideboard, the long mirror, the knickknacks left from previous tenants that had somehow become part of the furniture. I knew the memory tapping on my shoulder, as surely as the two ghosts that stood inches from my turned back, echoed from four years ago, a little longer maybe.

I stepped backwards, physically, slipping into the feet of me four years ago, a little longer, a little larger, a lot more…innocent.

No. Ignorant.

No: naïve.

We had just come downstairs from a reading in my apartment. Back when my living room had horrible black leather furniture, courtesy of a roommate with oppressive taste. There had been three of us at the end, chatting into the wee hours, long past the shop talk, into a discussion of what intimacy meant. How intimacy and sex were not the same thing. How friendships could be intimate. How glad we were to be friends.

Despite that, I’d spent the conversation in my comfy chair, purposely separated from the other two who were tangled up like siblings on the couch. They both lived in another part of Queens. They decided to take a cab home to their separate apartments. We descended these same three stories, myself last of all to close the door behind them. She, with whom I was friendly but not bosom buddies, stood in the doorway, keeping an eye out for the cab. He, who for a year – longer – I’d come to call my best friend, stood with his back to the mirror, waiting for me.

I gave her a hug farewell. It was a nice night out. Not quite summer yet. I turned to him. He was, perhaps, a little drunk. His eyes were heavy and tender. He had been trying not to cry all night, as we spoke of how people come to know each other. Grow close. Love.

His arms opened.

I walked into him.

Only aware afterwards that something had shifted: his arms tight around my waist; my own tangled on his shoulders. I wished that he would cry. Allow himself emotion. Grief.

I squeezed him, ready to let go.

He held me closer. I let him.

Felt his head draw away from me.

Place a tender kiss upon my cheek.

My hand drifted into his hair, as he lingered on my skin, for the languid space of a synchronized breath.

The cab came and they were gone.

He had never kissed me.

He was my best friend, and I’d be lying if I said that’s all I wanted – although myself of four years ago could not admit that to herself. Not then. And even so, I cherished the friendship we had. The partnership. The intimacy. The ability to take turns holding each other up. The encouragement to do more, professionally. The persistence to work more, create more, be more, delve deeper into truth; be more beautiful with our verse drama: the thing we both loved.

He was an actor. My actor. A playwright, too. He did my shows. I did his. He believed in my work. I believed in his. I gave him words to speak, and he gave them life. He gave me space to work, and I wrote galaxies for us to play in. He gave me space to be a person, not just a function. He demanded I be a person, not just a function. He had less interest in what I could “do for him,” than who I was. There were, at that time, very few people in my life who didn’t need from me. Who were willing to just be. To just be with each other. To make space for being, more than doing. Who delighted in being. Together. With me.

A few weeks later, things went terribly right and then terribly wrong.

Two years later, we stopped speaking.

Yesterday was his birthday.

Tomorrow is mine.

Tonight, I stood there, hotly, in the very place, at the very angle where he had kissed me so many years ago; back when I didn’t know what that meant; back when I thought I had no wants or needs; back when I thought I was only worthy of giving: comfort, kisses. Back when I didn’t know how much I ached to receive…

And here I’m standing with a birthday necklace I sent myself clutched tightly in my hand; a gift I may not give myself because I live a life of deprivation, but even so, I can pretend for just this moment that I can give myself this gift. That I’m worthy of a God damned necklace…

Just like, years ago, he held me close and pretended for just that moment that he didn’t have to let me go; that he, too, might for once in his God damned life, be worthy to receive: comfort, kisses, friendship, intimacy…and yes, Love.

I miss him.

I don’t know him any more. And the man I stopped speaking to was a far, far cry from my best friend. Something calcified in him when we were disentangling our lives from one another: his tender eyes grew cold and hard; his laughing jaw grown tense around half-bitten words and cruel smiles that delighted in seeing me weary, giving, sucked dry.

I don’t know what sort of man he is now. I think he decided to stay brittle. He probably presumes I’ve remained a bitch. Who knows. Maybe we’re both right.

I’ve heard the music he composes since I stopped speaking to him. He still writes his traumas into lullabies. When I think of him, I worry about that.

I haven’t thought about him in years.

It was a long campaign to eradicate him from my heart. To erase him from my mind. To color with black crayon over every tender memory; pick them up like precious jewels and stuff them deep into the mud, behind heavy padded doors.

And yet…

What hurts the most is the memory of him. When I remember him. If. What hurts is the fact that I loved him, and loved working with him – and that no matter how emotionally brutal he was at the end, that cannot destroy how beautiful he was at the beginning.

What hurts is I’m writing a play about him – us, I guess – about then, now. Or say, rather, I am doing everything in my power, along with this blog, not to write that play. Not to write the heart and meat of it, as it traces something ache-wonderful through to its disintegration.

What hurts is that I don’t want to remember him as a person. What hurts is that it happened. What hurts – is that he mattered.

I have yet to lose a family member or friend to death. I’m sure, when that day comes, my world will crumble. How will it not?

Our hearts abhor a vacuum.

But what I hate more are these living deaths. The knowledge that if our paths were to cross in Manhattan, he and I collide on a crowded street corner, or the sudden shock of seeing him on a subway train, it would be his resurrection I couldn’t bear. Just as resurrecting him, now, through this art is costing me as much as any cross.

I needn’t write these plays, of course. Except that stories will be birthed as insistently as any infant. And this one’s been gestating for a while now. Breach birth, I’d guess. Not enough epidurals in the world.

My actors, the ones who are also friends – as since I cast whatever he became out of my life, I’ve been opened up to truer friendships – encouraged me last night to write the hard stuff. That doesn’t mean the awful scenes. In some ways it’s a relief to open up black veins and drain the ichor from them. What hurts is to dig up those precious jewels, those memories of standing in my foyer and being held; of cherishing; of letting him be human once again; of acknowledging that the person I am now is partially because, for a time, we were. That not everything was awful.

That certain people change us.

This is what I’m afraid to say, although once we used the words cavalierly in each other’s ears, with arms flung around each other’s bodies, eager to see each other and say it again:

I loved you. I love you.

I wish I didn’t, but I wish you happy. I wish we hadn’t met; I don’t regret we did. I am sorry to resurrect your corpse and put it on display. I need to resurrect your corpse and put it on display, because writing traumas into lullabies is the way to calcify your soul. Screaming saves you. And I am finally healing, and I won’t let the ghost of you keep me from my health. (I wish you would get healthy, too.)

That after years of living as mute as any Philomela, I need to speak. I need to claim my story. Eradicate the ghosts. Sweep house. Claim the jewels and wear them proudly in my crown. Erase the black crayon and blow the pages dry. Glue your chapter back into my book as just a part of me. Not to bury you in art, but to resurrect myself.

But still, dear friend, I wish that you were here. I think you’d like these plays. I miss your blarting laughter, and your eagerness for the thing that we both loved, and just sitting next to you in a theatre, being. I know we can’t. I don’t truly wish we would.

But I’m going to make room for your ghost.

Come, haunt me, honey.

I’ll leave the ghost light on.

Image courtesy of Pixabay