A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a giant metal box that had consumed the driveway of my childhood home. It’s called a Pod. You load your junk into it, and then someone comes and takes that junk to the small town in North Carolina where your single mother has decided to move to after your freshman year of college (of course at first you thought she was joking, and now she’s actually doing it, which is an entirely different thing than it originally was).
I like to think I was taking this whole move situation very well by hiding from my mom and the rest of this world in a 16×8 eyesore while slowly being baked alive. I sat on the plywood floor, sandaled feet sticking out to catch some of the nonexistent cool air, and allowed myself to sulk.
I spent my brief respite staring at the bundle of letters my brother had just delivered to me. Colorful scraps of paper tied together with a frayed crimson ribbon. I told myself I wasn’t in the mood even as curiosity repeatedly gnawed at me and pushed my fingers to fiddle with the fabric. The letters are a little mythical—a thing my mother had always talked about but that I’d never truly laid eyes on.
But I felt stupid as I looked at them then, naive and terribly awkward. They reminded me of my own shoddy penmanship and the final letter I wrote to the girl who had likely already forgotten me. I thought I had succeeded in compartmentalizing my first heartbreak, and yet my mind was back there again. Her number still sat in my phone, our final message a different version of the same two people on the final night we saw each other.
The letters felt heavy in my hands. My father’s perfect looped cursive dotting every page. He wrote with graphite instead of pen, a habit I’ve inherited. Ballpoint feels insubstantial against good paper.
Pastel blue, pink, and yellow stationery contains the things I didn’t get to see for myself.
A handful were typed up instead of written as the dates span the late 90’s and into the early 2000’s. My mother’s name was consistently paired with dearests and the word love. My father talked about my brother and I before we were even a notion to the rest of the universe. Movie dates, picnics, and walks at the lake. I paired these words with the photo album I’d just flipped through and the cake topper I’d just wrapped with craft paper.
I wanted to shake the two exuberant young people in those wedding photos. I wanted to tell them that it won’t last forever and prepare them for what’s to come, curious to know if they would have changed anything if they knew their own fates. Is it ethical to steal joy if its impending absence would hurt worse later on?
But I was helpless as I sat around the mementos of a life long gone. Laid out in front of me stood a reminder that it all existed at one point in space and time. Suspended but contextually changed. Proof that they were happy. Proof that it was real. Once.
So there’s the issue of the box. And the issue of the girl poking inside of it, as a newer, more personal pain ebbs and flows inside her chest.
I don’t like being bitter. It feels different from pessimism. It wants to be known to the rest of the world too desperately, includes itself in situations where it can size itself up against joy and overpower a person with its hostile taste. I don’t like the feeling of it as it settles in my gut and tries to cultivate resentment. I want to move on to the part where all the grief and frustration I feel is an afterthought.
To look back and think that a life was temporary instead of non-existent. Where tangible reminders of life as a transient concept are welcoming instead of a punch to the gut. Where I can rip the shrink wrap off the green leather-bound notebook she gave me for Valentine’s Day and use it anyway.
It all feels so frivolously fragile. Romance. Investing in something with such a significant risk of failure seems like it should always be inadvisable. Heartbreak is a looming risk of love, so impossibly difficult to chase away.
But so is isolation.
So we take the chance and love anyway.
To be unjudged. To feel something so wonderful, it hurts that badly to lose.
Because it feels right, and we can’t help it.
Because it’s all we can do.
Maybe that’s enough to keep coming back to it.
Georgia Hope writes queer fantasy with a southern gothic twist and essays that break down the turbulent relationship between adolescence and academia. Her idea of a good time is exploring haunted small towns with a notebook, camera, and a large cup of iced coffee. When she’s not making her readers cry you can find her gathering more bizarre lore for her next story or having an existential crisis on her instagram page @georgiainabook.
Featured image by on Ranurte Unsplash.
