i’ve spent the last year and a half not thinking about you. every time you come into my mind, i push you out. i banish you. i can’t do it. i can’t just think and remember and wish i could hear your voice. i can’t cope with it, so i choose to not even try. but you keep popping up the past couple of weeks. there’s been too many nights when i’m lying here, trying to fall asleep and there you are, causing tears to be shed and regrets to come flooding, too.
why was i so stupid? i never should have left the answering machine at your house, to be thrown out by your landlord. it was a good enough clue that i called your number 20 times in the month after you died, just so that i could hear you saying you’d call back. god, i really miss your voice. i barely even remember it anymore, already. i need to know what it sounded like.
and this time, i can’t stop crying. every other time, since it was only two weeks fresh, i could just flip the switch and poof! you disappeared. but no, tonight, you won’t let me sleep and it’s not fair.
it would be different if we just weren’t speaking. if we’d fought and one or both of us was too stubborn to make the first step towards amends. but no, someone somewhere decided that the last time i spoke to you, when you were conscious and knew who i was and what i was saying, it would be some spectacular hassle of an afternoon, wrought with tension and soon-to-be-unfulfilled promises.
i called you, you know. three days after we saw you. but you weren’t in your room at the hospice and so i figured that you were out, smoking or heating up your coffee for the hundredth time, driving the nurses batty with your babbling about random things. i figured, i’d try again later, but i forgot. and the next day, well, i forgot then, too, only to have them call me that evening (those nurses i just mentioned) to say there’d been a change in your condition.
i’m sorry. i’m so sorry that i can’t just miss you and be okay with it. that i can’t coexist as this grieving daughter. i’m mostly sorry that i still hate you sometimes. that i sometimes wish that we’d never gotten to be friends, never had our 4-hour long conversations about nothing every weekend, that i’d never gone back to you being such an important part of me.
cuz really, i think that if i could have held onto that anger i felt at 15 years old, the shock and humiliation you instilled in me, then i wouldn’t hurt so badly right now.
cuz really, i don’t want to miss you anymore. i don’t even want to know that you’re never coming back.
