DECEMBER 13
I slam the book shut, shivering in my chilly room. The problem with recounting this kind of love is that it all falls apart in the rearview mirror. To watch our love unfurl like this – it’s like it’s happening all over again, unraveling in my hands. I can feel her, I can smell her, I can hear her, and it’s making me come undone. These wounds are too fresh. So I stop reading for a bit.
The next day Kevin invites me out. I know it’s a charity move, but I go along with it anyway. At first it’s just Kevin and his boyfriend and a few of my other friends, but before long we get absorbed into this group of girls having a bachelorette night. Even in a party I am alone, adrift in a sea of kids young and pretty and chattering needlessly, but soon I start talking to this one girl Claire, who is cute but not Summer. From the first beer Claire starts putting her hand on my arm and squeezing my muscles, and no matter how disinterested I try to act, she doesn’t care. She isn’t swayed. I can tell where things are going, but I try to play it cool. At eleven we all walk to my friend’s for another drink at his home bar, and things get heated. Claire sits on my lap while we play this drinking game called Never Have I Ever, and I can’t bring myself to push her off. And soon she is dragging me deeper into the house.
We kiss our way back to a bedroom in the darkness. I try to be light and normal and happy, but I cannot. I’m confused, and getting more confused by the second. We find a bed and start fooling around, and all the while, all I can think is oh my God I used to do this with Summer oh my God this is weird oh my God where is she I miss her. And when Claire turns on a lamp to take off her shirt, I swear to God I see Summer. She’s standing right there in the corner, next to the air purifier. What the fuck is wrong with me?
Something in me cracks, then breaks. I get so disgusted with myself that I start to cry – full-on crying, with choking and slobbering and whimpering. Claire gets totally wigged out and jumps up. “What the fuck?”
“I am broken,” I not so much cry as choke. “Summer broke me. Broken broken broken broken…”
“Fuck,” she groans. “Of course he’s nuts. Ugh, this is just my luck. I’m Ubering home.”
I walk home, fall into the shower, and turn the water all the way up, savoring the burn on my skin. I deserve it. I’d cheated on a ghost.
After that I steal one of my mom’s pain pills and let my mind wander. You know, maybe I’m done with dating forever. Maybe I had no more love left to give anyone. Maybe I’d given Summer all of me, and she’d taken it. But the funny thing is, I don’t want me back. She can keep me. She was more than worth the loss. The world was filled with love stories – ours killed me, and it was still my favorite.
~
When I went to New York City with my school one year, my teacher showed us a huge granite rock in Central Park with strange marks down the side, like some giant hand had scraped it from heaven. She said they were actually marks left by glaciers rolling over it thousands of years ago, rubbing pebbles down the surface in their retreat north after the last ice age. And that was what my soul looked like: I had been scraped clean by grief. And nothing at all was left of me.
As I collapse into bed, the misery rolls over me in waves, scraping down my body, slamming into me, leaving nothing left to destroy. And I that’s when I realize cannot do this anymore. The anger is back, and the will to live has gone.
I steal a bottle of mom’s wine from the fridge, some cheap pink shit, and barricade myself in my room as the monsters drift into my mind. As I get drunker, I get to thinking: this is such fucking bullshit. I can’t even go to the bars without having a meltdown. No matter how hard I try, and no matter how much strength I get from the ghost in Summer’s words, nothing helps. I think of her, and those afternoons when we would walk down Cedar Street and hang tight and be on each other’s team, and the future is not something I look forward to anymore. I am battling against a winning current, and my arms don’t want to fight for much longer.
Something in me snaps as I picture the eager look in Claire’s eyes, and that’s when I decide to make the exit. I don’t want to live in a world without Summer anymore. I tried, and I failed. Every minute of reading the journal just reminds me of what I don’t have anymore. I don’t want to move on – I just want her. And it so much harder to live without love than it is to die.
When I look at the adults around me, I fear for my own future. They are not alive. They don’t look at the world like I did when I was with Summer, when I was happy. They don’t look at anything like I looked at Summer. Why not just die now, instead of living my life as a walking, breathing corpse? Oblivion is inevitable. It is my destiny. So, taking this all into account, I stumble to a construction site across the street and steal a cinder block. A passing night jogger looks at me a little weird, so I pretend I’m just taking a break from jogging, too, before I grab the block and run. I store it with a rope in my closet, behind my fishing net. And I think I might use it to kill myself in the morning.
I love my mom so much, and I am going to miss her, but I can’t stay here. I am going to fail her just like my father did, leave her alone in a dusty home, but I cannot stop this. I am on a relentless march towards nothing. Why delay destiny?
And that’s all I have to say about that.
Except this, the note I write for my girl under a cloudless winter night sky:
I gave it my best
I gave it my all
But I can’t do this
I can’t stand this place
I can’t be here
Without you.
So I’m
Gonna kiss the sky
Gonna bounce off the clouds
See what’s on the other side
So see you soon, darling
See you soon
But as I try to slide into what may be my final sleep, a thought comes to me. I want this story to end before I do – maybe that will increase my odds of seeing Summer again when I die. I want to depart this place with every possible piece of her inside me, so I steal another bottle of wine and open the book for the last time.