"how will he know you loved him - unless you try to destroy yourself?"

I have felt my mom worry over the past few days. I tell this to my best friend, I tell this to my spiritual healer.

It is an unexplainable occurrence. When you can carry the dead’s feelings. Now, I don’t know if this is because I knew my mom was listening to what I was writing to her - and I knew exactly what her human form would tell me, or if she was seeing something that I couldn’t from a different realm. Can the dead see the future? Is there such a thing as the future? Everything moves, everything is permeable. Nothing stays the same.

I am going to tell you something. A man that I was once involved with, had a best friend who took his own life. He told me he couldn’t talk to his other friends about it, because he didn’t want to make them sad.

It becomes like that, doesn’t it? Grief. That feeling of inconveniencing someone with your own pain.

“I had this nightmare - 6 months ago. He was sitting on the edge of my bed, talking to me. I haven’t slept since.”

My biggest fear became this: that he was going to follow in his best friend’s footsteps. He had vices. He had a temper. He was waddling in that first year of grief. Which mainly exists of denial. Which mainly exists of ignoring a hole, but also trying to fill it at the same time. No one says the right thing. Everyone disappoints you. Everyone seems to move on. And the only person who can fix it - you will never see again.

“Resilience. It’s the one thing that differentiates human beings from animals. We can live without certain people, but a lot of animals die without their mate.” I tell my dad over dinner one night. I’ve paraphrased something I’ve read in a book. It’s an interesting fact, but it does not make me feel any better.

When the relationship between me and this man first ended, many moons ago - I set out on my own path of self destruction. Sex was a great tool to feel nothing, but to also feel everything at the same time. I would close my eyes, pretend they were him, let myself feel cared for, and then remember. Self loathing is all part of the survivor’s guilt, part of the destruction, and I became thankful when they stood up to leave.

“Familiar hell over unfamiliar heaven.” As my friend

karlie flood

says.

I don’t know when my path of self destruction stopped. I don’t think we ever fully stop destroying ourselves, but I think we do reach a point where we all get tired of telling ourselves the same story.

In 2019, I started to write. I was two years out of losing my mom, and one year out of losing him. I realized I had become a great actress over the years. “It’s fine” - was the routine answer to every sympathetic smile.

Writing was my way out of that familiar hell. Of pretending, of being misunderstood. People might not understand the pain of losing a parent, but they will feel the pain that comes with losing a relationship. So he became my muse.

Our First Muse.

“He loves what you write. You know this.” My spiritual healer tells me. “Because it’s always been the truth.”

“That’s what makes it hard.” I tell her. “I could write anything about him. Say anything about him. And I know he will tell me that it’s my truth, and he will tell me that it’s beautiful.”

-

"How will he know you loved him - unless you try to destroy yourself?" Is a quote from Sloane Crosley’s Grief is For People. The author’s best friend took his own life. So today, I picked up this book in a better attempt to understand his pain.

One of the things that I am learning about grief, is this:

Maybe the more we destroy ourselves, maybe - that’s more of a proof that we loved. Is that morbid? The harder we cry, the deeper we felt. If we do not talk about them, if we do not write to them, or write about them - where do they go? Where does our love go? Do they miss us? Are they destroying themselves, too?

I tell him that we share a similar pain.

“But you were a daughter, Emily.” We are holding hands. I know that he is trying to diminish his own grief, his own love.

“Doesn’t matter. It’s all same pain at the end of the day, isn’t it?”

-

It’s a strange concept - to mourn someone who is very much alive. I thought about this in Farmboy the other day, and burst into tears while standing in front of the fresh herbs.

It has been eight years since I met him. And each time that we reconnect, and each time that we disconnect - that familiar feeling wades in. Grief. The remnants of what is left of us. The words, the letters, the vowels. This is all we have left.

I had to walk away in December - not because I wanted to. But because I needed to. Because I knew I could not carry his grief, I could not hold his hand on his path of self-destruction. The vices are there, are very much still there - and I hope that one day, that they become less. But he is a reminder of why I chose to write. Because I was him, too.

A few weeks ago, my dad brought over a box of old clothes with a diary from 2021 buried inside.

In this leather bound notebook, I have written down:

“I love him. But he will destroy me.”