They tell you not to eat before it happens. They tell you to hold it in until they can get a sample. They tell you to wait. To enter. To put this gown on. To lay down. That this is going to be cold here, and there. What drug they've just given you. To count down from 100 hundred. If you're ready. But you're never ready. Even when they say "This is going to be uncomfortable just for a second" and "This might pinch". Then after wards, they hand you a bottle of more drugs, with longer names than you can pronounce in your current state. They give you a clean little packet of papers, that is supposed to explain everything you need to do for the next week, and if anything should happen that isn't covered in those pages, to give them a call.
But you can't call them after you wake up from another nightmare. You can't call them when you cry every hour because the shock finally hits you days afterwards. They don't mention that in their papers either; how you'll have to stand there with the knowledge that you let something go. That thing you and others told you you'd be better off without. That thing that books and movies describes as "the best thing to happen to you". So that makes what you did "the worst thing to happen to you", right?
But it isn't in the losing it, it's in the wanting to keep it with every fiber of your being since the moment you woke up in a half-daze to test yourself at five in the morning. That moment when you think your mind is playing a cold trick on your heartstrings, and yet after the floor stops spinning, you realize that it actually happened to you. Even as you're calling the other member to this party, long distance, at a reasonable hour that is long past the hours you've been living with this realization alone. Then trying to convince him to fly down to your hometown now, no not three weeks from now, but now. Right here. Because you need his arms right now, and his words to convince you out of your desires. You need to feel his skin, because it's the only thing that will be like that thing that is growing inside of you. You need to feel the brush of his hair against your cheek, because it was going to be similar to the crown of hair inside of your body. The one you'll never touch. Or ever see.
They never tell you how you have the date burned into your memory, like a cattle prod, and that every year afterwards you will have to drink yourself into a stupor to celebrate the loss of something that took a part of you with it. They never tell you that afterwards, you feel half the woman you were before. Even when they remind you of what you can have again, and again, and again. None of it matters. How can it? The first one was let go, no... ripped out. Pinched out. How can you replace that feeling? That longing?
That's right. You replace it with his words, when every night you woke up in sweat over another dream of her beautiful face, and her precious laugh that you have on a tape in the cassette player that is your innocence. His words "Don't worry baby, we'll have another one" another what? Accident? Isn't that what you called it? Isn't that what it had always been, even after you left me shortly after? After I went insane with the post-traumatic depression, after I swallowed an entire bottle of pills in front of you?
I guess we really did have 'another', after all.
Dedicated to December 28th
