“Look Skyward”
So vividly, I remember sitting in the passenger's seat of Matt's PT Cruiser - we were at the 35S Frontage Road and Cesar Chavez intersection, a few years before the Rainey district was really a thing. It was full sunlight out, so it had to have been early afternoon. I don't remember where we were going or what we were doing, but he said something... He had a way of casually saying things that somehow really hurt. I guess he knew which buttons to press although I don't think he ever did it with malicious intent.
We were listening to "Were My Sweetheart to Go..." which hadn't been released yet. I think I had finally gotten some mixes and we were checking it out. We were just beginning our relationship and right then he half jokingly made a comment about how he would have to break my heart: "I kinda have to, right? Otherwise what would you write about?"
I was infuriated and shocked. After a speechless pause I think I said something like, "Oh, like I don't have enough pain and misery in my back-catalogue?"
I always think about that when I sit down to write something and find myself grappling for words and stories. I was right - there's plenty to draw from, I don't have to have fresh wounds to lick. But there's a little bit of me that fears that he was right. Mentors of mine have for at least a decade criticized this character flaw - my always "needing" some crisis to overcome, that I fancy myself always "surviving" something - not to mention my obsessive nostalgia, never really living in the present, trying to grasp onto what came before.
Matt ended up "breaking my heart" so many times I had a hard time keeping up with logging it through song. That's okay. It may have even been necessary. But that thing he said is still cloying when I'm trying to think of something to say. My current relationship is so pleasant and stable that I have to dig into the back-catalogue.
And since November 23, 2013 (and even before that), I often try to resist what I most times am unable to - writing about Maria.
In not too long she will have been gone longer than I got to know her. It was such a brief window, but an impression that will weigh on me for the remainder of my life, likely.
She left me a voicemail a week before she died that she was approached by a strange man who claimed to have psychic perception and that he needed to talk to her. "This is your last time around," he said. And she was so stirred up by this she felt compelled to call me and tell me right away. "I can't wait to go home and write about it, explain it all to you." She never did. Or if she did, she didn't live long enough to show me.
Admittedly I've always liked the idea of ghosts. That we never really leave. Our friends all thought she'd be textbook-poltergeist. Violent and physical, impulsive and not to be ignored, but after her death it was eerily quiet. I had only a few dreams about her at first, and then I didn't see her again, except occasional fever-dreams. I kept listening to the voicemail. To hear her voice, of course, but also what she said. I had to let her go. She was really gone.
I would rifle through papers she wrote on. Reread her creative-writing blog posts. Once I even thought I felt a secret note inside a stuffed animal she gave me and almost opened it up before I realized there was nothing there and that I had to let it go. There was no more to be heard. We had said just about everything we needed to to each other.
I have a few treasured things hanging on a special wall in my home. Photos of friends, curiosities, little treasures and other things that inspire love and mysticism in me. In recent weeks a framed piece of art Maria gave me and a photo of her hand I washi-taped to the wall keep falling down. Nothing else falls down. I know I can't expect to hear from her again. But I want to.
This song is an imaginary conversation between the two of us, my pleading for her (and myself) to remember the good things, forget the bad, and she telling me to keep seeking her out no matter what happens.
And then my reply, "I can't hold on to what's gone. I can't hold on to no one."
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