the final nail

Oh what a burial it has been. It began over a year ago:

I was in the shitty apartment that I enjoyed, despite the fact that I kept denying it was shitty (nothing really worked, things broke down and stayed broke, it was small and cramped and I slept on the floor, heard my neighbors' conversations and hoped they heard mine, felt for the first time that I not only lived like I was in a hotel, I lived like I was in a men's residence). I don't remember when it was exactly, because those months after that shock were a zombiefied blur (it could have been November or January), but there was a point when I excavated all the things he gave me over the years, the things I hadn't even thrown out the first time we broke up (because yes, I am a sentimental fool and I cherished them even though we were broken up) and I made the first tiny steps to a recovery. Gathered around me were the remnants of the life I used to live, squished up on me like I was riding in a cramped subway car and there were boxes everywhere, my stuff was all over, jutting, scraping, pushing against me. I couldn't take it anymore, I had to start living there, even if I didn't feel alive.

So I emptied a big black garbage bag I had either been using in lieu of a dresser or had been too vacant to empty and began filling it with all the items that had his mark on them, his childish scrawl across a paper for "Valetine's Day," the first year, that good year, when he gave me a record of a band I liked (happily, I cannot recall which band), scraps of papers, folded over papers, letters, cards--all perused thoroughly with a sense of mockery (love me forever, my ass!), and a heap of detritus that held some significance at some point, a rock for skipping from the cape, a ticket stub for Bright Eyes, a silver quarter he found.

When I was done, I considered burning the thing so that I would not rifle through the trash bin behind the apartment building the next day in hopes of retrieving the bag. I chided myself for being silly and fell asleep, emotionally burned out, the way he always predicted I'd be, but I never listened:

He said it in a poem that I wrote on the back of a photograph that he took of a beautiful white gerber daisy that had a purple iris and a dark purple bud for a pupil.

I pulled that picture out of the thousands he had in his vast collection of cast-offs (to be a good photographer, one must learn to take a thousand pictures and hope one hundred of them are decent; it is the ten percent rule) and immediately fell in love with how tender a man he was to stare at that particular flower and render it so beautifully; he managed to blur out the greenery and create a medallion out of it, each petal was a brilliant three dimensional feather, that plucked, looked like they would be wonderful to stroke against a cheek.

The poem itself is gone. I am trying to remember how it went, I remember the way it looked on the back of that photograph, because I studied it when I was sad about us, I used it as a bookmark so that I would see it and remember his ability to see the beauty in anything. It was short. Five lines. To not be able to remember is probably a good thing, so I will leave it at the essence or what I thought I understood it to be.

It was about a fight we had, early on in that first year, a fight that left us both worn out and exhausted, a fight that we didn't hold back on our feelings; like a fire raged between us, but in the end we were still standing.

Is it any wonder I fell head over heels for a guy who could take a fight and make poetry out of it? He managed to make the ten percent rule work in his behavior, for every thousand acts, a hundred of them burned brightly and brilliantly for me.

Except maybe he meant that the passion between us would burn us out until all that was left was the somewhat shoddy foundation of our love (its shoddiness finally unearthed by that last thing, the shock), the hollowness was felt down to the earth.

So the garbage bag was the beginning, and as I look back, it was the easiest thing, if you can imagine that, because those things are gone, and I can't ever get them back. Still, there are the memories of them, of him, of us.

Last week, at my mother's, going through photographs (in an attempt to rid her life of clutter) and I saw so many pictures of us that she had (because he was not just a part of my life, but a part of all of our lives). Next, it was seeing his coworker and wondering if she remembered me (she was there for some small fires, things that, at that time, happened so often that it took next to nothing to ignite us: a look, a word, a tone, a tenseness; he had me wired like a booby trap. Or as Fiona Apple once said it better, "He fondled my trigger then he blamed my gun," from the song "Limp.") and feeling the hot shame of public indiscretions and wanting to say sorry to her. Then it was while I was with a client, I came across an order he'd processed for her, and that same scrawl pierced my body, in one swoop I was turned inside out and realizing how he was still a part of my life, even in these little ways, that the roots of it had gone so far and so wide.

And yet, the girl in the photographs isn't me anymore. And the rest of it, it's been long enough. So I might occasionally encounter reminders of him, but I'm done mourning, it's time to throw away my memories and bury everything I knew.

Goodbye, to you the Burnham, Mr Burnham, Mr ______ Pants (an endless array of choices there were), then simply Pants. Thank you for playing.