It is October 26th. A minute ago I was in the bathroom, hunched, red ink on my back skyward, heart sliced open and pouring blood onto the wet tile. Mostly I am fine though. How strange to be 30, how comforting, the emotions of 20 tempered with all the logic, self-respect and steadiness hard won of the past decade.
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I am biking home slow into a sunny Saturday afternoon, green grass and blue sky, eating chips and playing music and singing along, still feeling the oxytocin of the morning. For some reason I need to look at my phone, and I see the dispassionate white letters above the time, November 8th, 2025. My oxytocin buzz is gone with the shock, pieces of my brain and stomach are dropped into the mine shaft that opened up unexpectedly under my bicycle. It is good, it is progress, it is successful mental reconditioning that I have not realized until midday that this was supposed to be our anniversary.
One year ago we met, with the mania and terrible promise of that November, just a few days past the election. And so I have thought of you dutifully since, every single day I am fairly sure…through the mad infatuation of the winter where I played the bubbly pop song titled with your name incessantly, and then the calmer spring and summer, where we celebrated every monthly anniversary and on the sixth one I made you a half cake that said “Hap Anni”. Working to weave the fabric of our lives together, plans and promises, talking every single day, watching your blue dot drive home from work just because it felt a little closer to you. I have thought of you into the insecurity that August brought, the first big ruptures, the first time it became clear that I probably just wasn’t enough for you, and in August I started working on your anniversary gift, and worked on proving myself to you while also holding onto the boundaries and dignity that I just can’t let go of at my big age. And it was my hope and belief that we just needed to make it to our anniversary, that everything under the sun ebbs and flows and spirals and that we were no different, and that I could recast the spell you used to say I put on you.
We didn’t make it, you left in waning October, and so I have been dutifully working to forget, to smooth out the neuroplastic tangles that have been made in my brain through a year of you. You are muted and contact deleted and sometimes I want to relapse and check on your socials but I almost never do. When I find myself missing you, I have started to remember to override the memory, I make my brain think of you at your worst, I put on the tapes of your ugliest features and meanest moments. I have been filling my phone up with beautiful women and there is no shortage of dates, only a shortage of time. Yet many mornings, I have had the thought “I guess this isn’t the day” when I have thought of you any way, waiting patiently for the first day I don’t think of you at all.
