let's be honest

you never loved me.

you just wanted to not be alone.

six years i lived with your inertia.

closed my eyes and turned my head and took my place outside of the world.

the thing is,

i don't want to be right.

i just want to be happy.

(and grief is heavy and thick and suffocating. colds even the warmest sun. and i will never again on this earth in this body speak to or hold or touch one thing from ivan. and every day that i talked to or didn't talk to ivan in his life he reminded me that i was able to be loved. and that meant something. and i wanted to be enough. i want who i am with all these mistakes i make to be enough.)

and i believe in now. in the bike rides and the dinners we make. the vegetables we grow and the things he tells me i am and the things he asks me to stop being.

i am allowed to need and give and hate and take.

and mostly i believe that we all try our best and some of us fall and most of us break but some of us make it anyway. all skinned knees and black eyes and open hands.

but i won't ask you to wait for me. i won't tell you what i can do. i don't know what tomorrow will bring.

i only know that i need this. a park bench and a lunch date and that lady who gives you her seat when she can see you need it more.

reality bites

i just watched the end of reality bites on tv and it reminds me of things like kira and chunky monkey ben & jerrys and those rolls with the flour on top that ivan used to bring to me from the tedeschis in dennis when that was the only thing i wanted inside me. soft bread.

and its kinda the story of me and joe though not really at all. but i am feeling sentimental. and my day off would be so much better if he was here.

i am fragile.

and i used to sing that lisa loeb song to ivan all the time and when i was sixteen he hated it but when i was 31 he would text me the lyrics when he was getting coffee in the morning and i was at work.

he died before i turned 32.

and when i dream of ivan now i am no longer taking the gun from his hand. i am laying on the bed next to him with my arms on his shoulders telling him again and again that he is not alone. that if he has to go at least he should know that.

and i wonder if he knew how much i loved him. how i would have done anything for him. i wonder if he knew that then?

already

i thought i told you already.
i tell you every day.

you just don't listen. you never listen to me.

and it is gray here. then sunshine. and love takes a whole lot of work. and i always give everything to people who only know how to take things away.

give me back my socks. and my dog. and the sound of the bushes brushing the window in the front of my house.

i have a pretty face. i have a pretty place. i need a pretty hand to hold me.

i am not young but i will always be your child

sitting there in that same pink bedroom wondering where my days will unfold. when that moment will come. will i see it coming or will the sky collapse on me as i lean from the car to get the mail. and it is summer there, always, when i think of my home. warm skin, beach hair, the sound of my dad mowing the lawn and my mother moving through the kitchen. peepers peeping, the buzz of the high tension wires, nana glo calling her cat in down the street.

there is no suicide, no divorce, no feeding tubes and no failing bodies --
just the silence of a flower ending and beginning, ending-and-beginning, ending, and, beginning its bloom.

working lunch.

i saw a lady faint in the park. then get up and talk to herself alot.
she said she was okay. i don't know. maybe she was drunk.
i had lunch with a work friend. it was a "working" lunch. we were talking about a client we have in common. i told my workfriend that one of my close
friends killed himself in december. workfriend told me her dad killed himself two years ago.

life is funny.

or rather, life isn't funny at all.

because

because even on the messiest days,
you take care of me.

i promise.

i will take care of you.