”...and it sounds like someone calling you home in the dark.”
I don’t need to write formal letters or emails or posts to you, I know. You’re always there in my head, you already know what I’m thinking But it’s nice to do it anyway, I suppose. What’s that thing about writing letters even if you’re never going to send them? You know.
There’s a severe heat warning over the city, over the county I think, and even though I feel more like a human than I did yesterday, I still called in and laid in bed with the cats. I finished Woodworking by Emily St James and took a bath and cried a little, and thought about words and family and what it means to be yourself.
There are letters I think about writing to our folks, letters to our siblings, both the one we talk to and the one we don’t. Okay, that’s a lie. I never think about writing a letter to them. But reading a book about how messy and raw families can be made me wish, for a moment, that I wanted to.
It didn’t last, but that’s okay. I don’t want to, and that’s okay too.
I was looking at old emails the other day. We wrote so many emails back and forth when you lived across the country, and then when you lived across the ocean, and then when you lived downtown. Threads long and winding about life, and the things we were reading, and the things we were struggling with. I read them and I smile because I can hear your voice so clearly when I do, and I miss that. I miss your voice so much.
But there are things in those emails that I pushed down, like how tense I was in that house, how much I shut myself up in my room where it was safe and quiet. How that was the space where I was allowed to be me, and the internet was an extension of that.
And now I am sitting in my own apartment in the city where I moved for you, but also for me. It’s my own space. All of it. I am the only one here and I can have whatever mood I want. If I want I can cry all day if I want. There is something freeing in that.
I love this apartment. I am fully aware of that at the moment because how good it feels to have the AC units installed. It’s too hot outside, but in here, I can think. I can be a person spread throughout several rooms, all my own space to do whatever I want with. That’s pretty good.
I’d like to tie all these musings together with a neat bow, but I don’t have a bow today. Nothing feels very neat today. Woodworking is set in 2016, and truthfully, I wouldn’t necessarily have picked a book that was set at that particular painful moment of history. Especially right now, in the second term of terribleness. But it made a terrible sort sense for the story, for the characters and where it takes them.
There were good things about 2016. One of them was Desert Trip. I still to find photos of that weekend, that big-ass truck you drove back and forth to the hotel and the venue. The ferris wheel that I think you rode at some point…I don’t remember what I was doing. Slipping through the dark to run to the bathrooms. The guy who liked my Dylan shirt. Screaming for Rihanna. You know all this.
I pulled your Inception shooting script off the shelf a few minutes ago to check a line. Yes, I’m trying to finish a fic. And there in the pages I found a couple of your ticket stubs from that summer. Only a few. I will find the rest at some point. Two days in September and one in August. How about that? Twelve years ago on the day you died, before it was that day, you were happily sitting in a darkened matinee of Inception (four dollars??? Remember those days.) Safely waiting for a train.
One reality won’t be enough for her now. It never would have been. You deserve endless worlds and realities and adventures. I hope you’re having them, Eames. I miss you so much. I love you.