March 21, 2010

Yesterday was the last day of winter. Early in the morning I drove down to Cambridge to help Simon move. The Vinyl Cafe was on the radio — a story about Winnipeg and this crazy elm growing in the middle of a goddamn street. When the city tried to cut it down all the women in the neighborhood linked their arms around it. But it was useless. Though the city left the elm alone, vandals set it on fire and it had to be cut down anyway.

For some reason the crackle of the radio, the helplessness of the elm, the early morning ride made me think of you. And I started to cry.

After all these months I still miss you like crazy. This winter without you has been the longest winter ever.

And now it’s spring.

Things have changed.

I’ve got a new job that uses my brain — a new place with windows and streaming sunlight — a new fluffy dog living with me — a new bike I use to zip to work in the morning.

But when I come home in the evening, everything reminds me of you.

I still have all your stuff. Your grandmother’s couch. Your dinning-room set that’s missing the chair you smashed against the wall. I eat my single-serving dinners with your forks and stir up my coffee with your spoons.

You left me too much, and I gave you nothing in return. I didn’t know how to love you. I was terrible at making you happy, and long ago I gave up trying to make you smile. So I pushed you away, and only after you left I realized what I wanted and now’s too late to have you back.

Everything changed this winter, but in some ways I’m back from where I started. I explained all this to the dogs but they didn’t seem to understand… When I first came to Canada I lived all of four houses up the street. I now walk the dogs through the same cemetery I used to walk to school. Sometimes I let them shit on my old school’s lawn and don’t clean up. The bells from the same church wake me up in the morning.

Then, as now, I feel I’m missing a part of myself. After all these years I feel like the same piece of shit swirling around the same toilet bowl.

And I’m trying to break free in my own way just like you did.