you or your memories

read to the end for an epiphany

There’s an Angel Olsen song I’ve been listening to a lot lately. It’s called “All the Good Times” and toward the end she sings so long, farewell, this is the end, and I'll always remember you just like a friend and oh, how that line has sticks in my heart. I never listen to the song just once; it’s never enough and it’s always too much and by my fourth listen I’m either in tears or feeling resigned, depending on the mood of the day.

Somewhere along the line, my memories started to warp and change, little amoebas shape shifting in my head, swimming around, bumping into each other and forming larger, more potent memories that somehow expand and shrink on their own.

I remember things differently now. Those fourteen years we spent together feel platonic in nature. Oh, were in love for a bit. That love was real and deep, needy and forceful. But it was also superficial at times, I see that now. Maybe we needed each other more than we loved each other, and maybe that need at times became cloying and impossible to fulfill. The thing about need is how difficult things become when a relationship is just two people constantly taking from each other.

When I look back through pictures of our past, as I do sometimes against my better judgment, I remember things as they were on the surface. Here’s us in Barcelona. Here’s us in the backyard drinking beer during one of his lapses in recovery. Here we are in Sacramento, in Memphis, at Disneyland. Christmas morning. Doing yard renovations. Sitting in our favorite Mexican restaurant. We had a seemingly normal, complacent life and that’s reflected in the hundreds of digital photos I have kept. But when I bring up those memories in my head, they’re different. They are not still shots of mundane moments. They are moving pictures, the memories become little movies, picking up what snapshots can’t capture. The angst. The worry. The anxiety. The pretending. We look so happy. We look so content. Were we ever those things, though? The pictures say one thing, my brain says another.

I’ve had more than two years to think about all of it, to lay those memories out before me, mental tarot cards telling me the story of my past, too late to warn me about my future. The shifting of this story, where it goes from fairy tale to heartbreak, does not happen suddenly or without warning, as much as I thought it did. Having all this time to sit and think about it, to run the movie of our relationship over and over in my head, I can pinpoint instances where alarms should have gone off. Maybe they did. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention to those sirens because my need to finally have a perfect, functioning relationship was so great I was willing to ignore the noise.

The memories were starting to all stick together so I am now unraveling them, bit by bit, song by song. I listen to Angel Olsen and I bring up mental snapshots of times that felt like love but looking back were just need and desperation in masks. I listen to the National as I unpack the memory of finding his slippers under the couch three months after he left; I never felt so alone as I did in that moment. I sort through fourteen years of what sometimes felt like bliss and other times felt like a curse.

I have stripped the love from all these memories. By fleshing them out and recognizing what was really there, what was beyond the photos that only partially tell our stories, I have come to realize that what we had was so very flawed from the start. That I am able to do this now, to look back with clarity, to point out where I went wrong and where he went wrong and where we went wrong together, is to put some closure on this, closure that I was never able to get from him.

And like that, while writing this, while trying to figure out a conclusion, a thought occurs to me: I have stopped loving him. I search my heart and no, there’s nothing there for him anymore. That space I had reserved for him is flush with other things now; the love of friends, of family rush in to fill that space.

It’s a strange feeling, to stop loving someone. Do I grieve this, too? What do I do with all this love I have to give?

I have stopped loving him. By giving life to my memories and looking fully and deeply into the past with clarity, I am able to let go. I have been looking for this, waiting for this moment for over two years. I am free.

So long, farewell, this is the end
And I'll always remember you just like a friend