Sleep

I was starting to wonder if life without her would ever feel right. How are you supposed to move on from your own life? It was like being an amputee. I could still feel her. I still looked for her. I wondered what she would think of my new apartment. I thought about where she would put the green rug and how she would be mad that I didn't burn sage before I moved in. I could hear her instructions on where to hang pictures and her complaints about the white walls. She would have hated this place. I hated this goddamn place. Nothing felt like home anymore. All of these things didn't belong here without her. They belonged in a place with music and a girl that liked things with history. I belonged in that place too. Before her, I might have had a chance at liking this apartment. I could just be a financial analyst with a contemporary apartment, going out with a woman in my office every Friday night. This woman would have a degree, but she wouldn't know anything. She wouldn't know what song would make me smile if it had been raining too long. She would think it was odd that even at twenty-five, I still had an affinity for climbing trees. No one has a chance anymore. Ivy was the person that understood me. She loved me even though I was uptight, a little too square. She took joy in showing me things I never would have looked at twice. But it wasn't all one sided, people always assumed that I was the only one learning. I could show her things as well. I taught her little lessons out of some of my old college books. She enjoyed our class time, she loved that I had things to teach. I lost so much losing her. More than I expected. I lost a way of life. Right now, I had an imitation at best. I got up, went to the office, ate meals, tried to sleep. It wasn't working. There was no sleeping without her. Even at thirteen, it made me anxious on the nights she didn't turn up. I worried that she wasn't coming back, or worse, that she was holding someone elses hand. All through college I wondered where she was sleeping, I wondered why I wasn't sleeping. I needed to touch her hair, to kiss her forehead. I just needed to feel her warm body close before I could shut my eyes. The night I graduated college was the first goodnights sleep I had gotten in four years. And now I'm back to insomnia. I tried music, but I hated everything new because she taught me better, and I hated everything old because it made me feel like there was a hole in my chest. I spent my nights looking through all of the things from the old apartment. Looking for her words scribbled on the strangest things. When she did it, it annoyed me. Now they were like a life raft. The only beauty I had left. I started thinking about why I left her. My parents thought she was just trying to change me, but they never understood her like I did. Sometimes it just felt like she wasn't there. Like I loved a girl that didn't exist. I didn't know how to handle it. I gave up. And then she gave up. By the time I realized it, it was almost too late. Her demons caught up with her and I just let them have her. In the hospital, I found out about her mom, and the man that they lived with. She couldn't look me in the eye anymore. She was ashamed and I didn't know what she wanted me to say.

Things fell apart. I should have asked her what she needed. But my parents taught me never to ask painful questions. I wanted to feel her in bed next to me and tell her nothing in the past mattered to me. I wanted her to know that I was sorry for giving her up to the demons. I wanted poetry, I wanted music, I wanted to get some goddamn sleep.