Everyday Stranger

A Somber Goodbye

This one is serious, so if it is a laugh you seek, wait until tomorrow, when my laugh track is back on.

Very soon I am going to do something that I have never done before, something that it is time to do.

I am going to bury someone.

Some of you that have been keeping up with me know that I have been in love twice. Deeply, madly, wildly in love, love where you look at them sleeping in the morning and just want to ask the fates what you did to deserve them, and what can you do to keep them. And I have had loss as well with those loves. The kind of loss that makes people just stand with their face up to the skies, exposing their necks to the rain, in a hope to let it in under the skin and wash away the ache. The kind of loss that attacks over a glass of wine, as you are driving late at night, or when you hear That Song on the radio.

I was in love with a man named Kim, and he was just as in love with me. If ever the Romeo and Juliet adage of Star-Crossed Lovers applied, it was with him. Our story is one of passion and throbbing. We met in Paris, and I to this day I remember the first thing he ever said to me.

We were at the Metro stop with a group, and the train was delayed. A large part of the group (a university group of students that went to school thanks to Mommy and Daddy and not like me, a meagre student loan dog) wanted to take a taxi, but seeing as I had scraped and saved every last penny to be able to go to Paris for a week, I knew that wasn't in the budget cards. As most of them packed up and headed up the stairs to flag down a taxi, one of them asked me why I wasn't coming, too.

"Because I paid my own way here, and I don't have enough to pay for those kinds of things. I don't have excess cash because I paid my way here." I said, feeling stupid and very, very poor.

Kim, seated on a bench nearby, looked up at me and said softly "Some people are carrying some pretty heavy baggage with them."

I was shocked. We didn't speak again until the afternoon, when we were in the Quartier Latin, having all of us re-grouped. Someone asked Kim the kind of woman that he liked, and a bit ahead of him, I turned to hear his answer. He looked at me, eyes burning, and raised a hand, pointing at me.

"Her. That's the woman I like."

The deal was sealed.

We were together a long time, living together, needing each other, unable to picture life without each other. It was magic. It was all we ever wanted, and we both knew that we would die together, since life simply had no other option. We dreamt of a house by the sea, an enormous library, a dog or two roaming in and out of the room as we would read books curled into each other's sides on a large couch.

We even had a suicide pact. Should one of us be dying, in pain and anguish, the other would help them go. And then the remaining survivor, faced with living life without the other person, would then end their life.

After all, if we didn't have each other, what was the point of going on with life?

We lived happily in a little house in Dallas. He collected action figures and Sony PlayStation games. He was a Detriot Red Wings fan. He was English, and took his tea accordingly. He wrote me stacks of love letters, all of which I still have. Batman was his hero, a tortured vital soul that saved the world on a nightly basis.

But then real life came into play. Basically, I wanted to get married. It became all-consuming to me, and if Kim was one hundred percent sure he would be with me forever, why not sign on the dotted line? But after many fights, it became clear-sharing a name was bitterly important to me. The piece of paper was worthless to him. We reached an impasse, and we split up.

And that was a hard time for us both, and we decided zero contact between us was the only way to survive. I became a very heavy drinker. I became unable to eat, unable to do anything but throw myself into my job. The whole city of Dallas became one big reminder of what I once had, and what we had lost. So I moved to North Carolina with a new job, still only a sliver of the person I was before. A few months later, I found I was dreaming of him so much that I couldn't get him out of my mind, so I rang him up at the office.

That's when I got the news.

Kim was in Baylor Medical Center, in Dallas. He had leukemia. He was dying.

I got on the first plane back to Dallas and cried the entire time.

When I got to his hospital room, it was very late in the evening. He was sitting up in the bed, and looked so tiny in amongst the pillows and beeping and blipping machines. He had no hair and was white as a ghost. I started crying all over again, and he started crying too. He had draped a sarong around him that we had bought together in Belize. A cooler I had given him sat next to the bed, holding ice for him to try to stomach. I was everywhere and no where in that hospital room.

We talked for a very long time. He told me how much he loved me, and always would. He told me I was the one for him. He told me he would get better, recover, and we still had that little house by the sea in our future. We would meet up years ahead, both of us having had other lovers and other lives, and it would be as if no time passed since we had loved.

He looked at me. "Helen," he said softly. "As you get older, you are only going to become more and more ethereal."

And in my entire life, no one had ever said something so wonderful to me before, ever.

When he started to get drowsy, and I got up to leave. I looked up at his machinery around him, and I saw his eyes looking at me. Our suicide pact. According to it, I should help ease his way out of this pain, this torture, this disease eating its way through his body.

But I couldn't do it. I couldn't make that choice. He was my future, and I was too fucking selfish to take that choice away. I couldn't picture my life without him, so I couldn't put my desires ahead of what was best for him. I put a silver bracelet that I had bought in Bali and always wore around his wrist. I told him he was my heart and soul. I kissed him, and cried some more.

We said goodbye, and that we loved each other. The second gift in my life.

And then I left for the airport.

He went into remission, and was well again. One year later, in August 2000, I got a phone call in the very early morning. Groggy, I woke up enough to realize that it was my mother calling.

Kim had died.

He was gone.

I was forced to be left behind, to live in the world that he created.

Kim is not something I talk about to anyone. The truth of the matter is, he is not something that I can bear. When I look forward into my life and think about my future and dying, gone is the house by the sea and I realize I am going to be dying alone. It actually makes sense-why do people say they want to die in their lover's arms?

Don't you know that your lover is going to have to live with that image forever?

I look around for him still. I swear I see him in crowds, and I go rushing forward, to see if it is him. But it never is, and all the chase usually warrants is someone looking at me like I am a lunatic.

Kim is gone, and I need to move on now.

He was creamated and his family shared the ashes. There is no way for me to go say goodbye to him, but it is about time I did so. So I am going to buy a Batman action figure, take his box of love letters, and bury the lot.

I am going to say goodbye.

I don't mean for this to be a somber and depressing post. The point of it is this: I am moving on now. Wherever he is, and whatever he is doing, he will always be with me, you couldn't pull him out of me if you tried. However, just because he has died does not mean there is no house by the sea for me, a house with time enough to love. I actually feel like a weight has been taken off of me, that the guilt of surviving has passed, mostly because this is my life. And it is time to do something with it. I need to stop thinking that I am stuck living in the world he created.

Because this world is mine. This heart is mine. These memories will be mine.

Goodbye, Kim.

-H.

Posted by Everydaystranger at October 5, 2003 05:29 PM | TrackBack