Prologue
CHRISSIE’S JOURNAL
The older I get the less I feel a part of my own story. I don’t think that is unique or strange for a woman in her forties. I hear it all the time from my girlfriends, how they slowly disappear and get lost in their marriages, their children or their careers. I don’t know if that is what’s happened to me. I don’t like to overly analyze it. I am quieter now and I savor the quiet in me.
I watch more sunrises and I stir the pot less. I’ve learned that things happen around me, because of me, and to me, and there is not much you can do or really have any true understanding of which kind of event each is. I breathe, I watch the sunrise, I love, and I cherish my tokens and my tears, kissing them both thankfully for they both are a part of me, bringing me here to where it is comfortable to be less a part of my own story.
As badly as I have done many parts of my life, it was never because I didn’t love. The old cookie tin in the closet holds both my love and my regrets.
I pull out my tokens and tears one by one and I stare at them, these pieces of meaningless nothing to others that are markers of the milestones of me.
I kept the photo of Alan and me for twenty-five years. It is the one of us that I keep with me always: Alan asleep beside me, leaning against my breast, at that quiet moment on the terrace during sunrise before he exploded into the universe, not just a star, but a non-waning supernova.
It is funny how a moment, the most significant moment of your life, can happen without you even being aware. At eighteen the photo made me cry. It was splashed across the tabloids with black tar innuendo and other photos, private violations that made me cry. It still makes me cry at forty-two, but the reasons are different. We looked so young. Alan, commanding in his universe, and yet lost and holding on to me. I was young, too, but I’m holding on to him. Somehow we made it through that complex and layered three weeks, but we were both so young.
There is another photo in my tin, cut from the newspaper from the day stories of the suicide ran in 1994. Kurt Cobain. The two photos are eerily similar: hair tumbling forward, the world at their feet and the air full of sorrow. I remember how shaky and sick I got when I first realized Kurt died at twenty-seven. If we are both alive after twenty-seven, Chrissie, we will both know what we are. I almost called Alan that day, but I didn’t.
Between the two pictures sits the silly half dollar from the bet Neil made me that night at Peppers. Neil was right, Kurt did change music forever, but I never paid my half of the bet.
It has been ten years since I buried Neil. I still miss him every day. There are many in my life who do not understand how I could love him, but I did and I still do to this day. We said it to each other simply that last day we lived as man and wife: you can’t help who you are in love with. We both had other loves, but it didn’t prevent us from loving in that human, connected way.
The objects tucked together make sense to me, but it is the picture of Alan that I look at the most. I knew the first time I left Alan that he was the love of my life. What I didn’t know that day is that the love of your life doesn’t always become the love throughout your life. Sometimes they are a thought, a private joy, a secret hurt, a ghost in passing, the ghost always at your side or a promise in the future.
Alan would become all those things for me and I would never again love anyone else the way I love Alan.
It is good, very, very good that none of us can truly see the future. It is good for all of us that the future, no matter what we see, is really black. I could not see the future, a heartbreaking and frightening thing, at eighteen. I can’t see it at forty-two, now a comfortable and quiet thing.
I listen to my family return to the house, bags being dropped, children running the halls looking for me. This is my life, the core, the everything that is me. It is a perfect place for me to step back, enjoy living, and be less part of my own story.
I am blessed that Jesse was here with me for nine years. Nine years; I did not always do it well, I did not always do it honestly, but I never regretted being married to Jesse.
So this is what I think happened. I don’t really know for sure. I pieced it together from things I was told and reading Alan’s biography.
It is peaceful to be in that place where the most significant parts of your life are not the parts you actively live on your own. They are the parts shared with you, the part of others you try to mend, the moments you are no part of and yet the catalyst for them to have been.
I sit back in the quiet and I let life, even my own, happen around me, where it is more comfortable.