Phoning a friend
The thing is that I am writing a brand new book and Henry is not here to read it.
The thing is that my hair looks like his used to except I need to get my roots re-done but spending money makes me want to throw up.
The thing is that some days I don’t want to be seen by anyone, even the dog, because no one is him and so no one sees me the way I most like.
The thing is that I don’t know how to talk about the fact that I miss him so much it feels like a knife in my gut and I think people think I should be used to it by now or that it should be normal or comfortable or familiar and maybe it is, but it is also so deeply hard to breathe with a knife in your gut and even harder to do it when you don’t know how to talk about it without worrying that people will think you’re being overdramatic or wallowing or something else.
The thing is that there are days where getting out of bed feels like an impossible task because I wake up and he has died all over again and, unlike the first time it happened, there are no teams of people with open hearts and arms to scoop you up and stop time for you and your broken heart because life has moved forwards for them and they love you, of course they do, but also why haven’t you moved forward too?
The thing is that sometimes I am convinced that actually I’m the one who died, not Henry, and this is all some weird, Henry-less purgatory and everyone I’m around is not real and the only thing that is real is that Hen isn’t here. Sometimes I am certain that if that first bit isn’t true, then the truth is that maybe I’m not the one who died, but something in me died that day and it might have been the best part of me or maybe it was the worst or else just an average part of myself but it’s still gone and so I am a person who is living in the world with something dead within me.
The thing is that I am actually a generally happy person except for the part where the person I love most of all isn’t around to love me anymore and I will reach a time in my life that marks me remembering him longer than I knew him and sometimes I hate facts like that almost as much as I hate my brain for reminding me of facts like that.
The thing is I used to know his number by heart. But it’s not his anymore and I don’t remember it at all.
The thing is that Henry is the only person I want to say this to because he is the only person who will hear it without being alarmed and put-off by the vulnerability of it, but obviously I can’t say it to him and if I could, I wouldn’t have any of these things to say in the first place because the truth is, if I could just talk to him on the phone, I think the knife would go away.
The thing is, some person smarter than me in all the ways that I am not smart should really figure out a way for us to talk on the phone with the people we love who happen to be dead.
They don’t even need to find out what happens when you die; I don’t care. I don’t need to know that, I would just like to give my best friend a call, complain about the fact that he isn’t here and gas is expensive and my hair looked like shit and I don’t know how to start the chapter I’m trying to write. I would like to listen to his sighs and tell him that I love him and that we’ll talk again in the morning. Because once I did that, I could hang up and go on with my day. That’s the thing.