A Diary Entry from October Twelfth
From the breakup vaults.
I’m back in Los Angeles and thinking about how the man I used to call mine is hopefully ten minutes away, sleeping alone in his bed. The bed I always meant to get more pillows for, but never got around to before my last dreamless night slept there. I’m not his and he isn’t mine anymore and in two days my sister becomes an in-law to some and a wife to one.
Heartbreak due to circumstance is a weird thing. Especially when it happens twice in three months to the same two people.
He was my one for as long as I can remember, the past 2 and a half years. He was shy and loving and awkward around adults. He made music and read and wrote from time to time. We ate pie together. We would watch movies and he insisted on turning all the lights off and I would fight the urge to fall asleep and lose. He would wake me up because his arm fell asleep. I always woke up before him—except this one time. Sometimes I would wake up excruciatingly early and never left without giving him a kiss just because.
The end ended like most endings. Sad, bittersweet and too soon, but also probably obvious from a few miles away. He remains in Los Angeles and I remain in San Francisco. The last we knew of each other was on the phone and I held secrets in my back pockets of the things he did that I never liked and how much my heart is broken and the fact that I am relieved in a way this has happened. I know he misses me because he called me the other day and told me. He also kept asking in different ways about our future. He admitted he “really screwed up this time” as if to punctuate this from the past times and potential future times.
He asked if I had kissed someone. Why would it matter to him? I know why, but I’m no longer his, although he mentioned that to him I still do feel like some sort of belonging he misplaced. He doesn’t feel like mine anymore, but also I have a stake in that claim. It’s hazy and weird and some days I’m the happiest I’ve been in a while, but tonight back in Los Angeles I’m uneasy.
I don’t think this place ever had the room for me to inhabit. I was always hopping along to other people’s orbits, never quite sure where mine was.
But the places I miss most here, were the ones that were so secret. I miss him and his hair and the way he smells and snores ever so slightly and I miss so much waking up next to him hitting snooze on the alarm three times, —the first sound of alarm consummating him rolling over onto my chest.
He was supposed to be here with me tonite, but instead the druggy girl friend of his got married and I had to see a video of the toast he made and heard him mention San Francisco and cannot shake the feeling of needing to know how much or how little I was on his mind that night.
What I do know is that the firefighter I exchanged certain things with—an area code followed by seven digits—texted me all day about nothing I cared about.
I thought I was fine, but this dry October night in Los Angeles is scratching me. The last time I was here things were different. Maybe that’s all that it is. Change.
