11 MONTHS
He’s getting so far away.
He becomes not a memory but a series of photos and videos, frozen in time. His father posts and reposts what few pictures he has. There are not many pictures of him. He didn’t take tons of selfies; he didn’t post much on Facebook. Sometimes I felt he could be an enigma. Two nights before he died, I remember being in New York, staring at his Facebook page, scrolling as far back as I could, trying to glean something that would tell me more about who he was and how he’d become who he’d become, how he’d changed and evolved into the person I knew.
I stared at the photos of him when he was younger, a teenager, sullen in some photos, awkward and post-pubescent in others, cocky and cocksure as he grew into a man. The look on his face in his early 20s in the military, he didn’t look like the guy I knew. He held his jaw a certain way, he looked a little bit like a tough guy, a jerk, maybe. But the man I had met had become more introspective, was sweet and kind, and a bit insecure. He grew more confident in the months I had been with him, his personality starting to swell up like an orchestra, the strings coming together to form a crescendo, where he was finally coming into his own, high on life, on himself, on his future.
Everything was going so well.
I close my eyes and try to remember the actual moments, not the photo, not the videos that I’ve memorized and can hear in my head. I try to remember the true memories not recorded by a device and replayed over and over and over. I try to remember the first time I saw him, or the weekend we drove out Port Townsend. I try to remember his presence, how it felt to be around him, to hear his voice, that gentle Southern lilt. I try to remember riding in the car with him, his little dog sitting on his lap, pushing his head out the window. I try, furiously to remember his smell, the musk he wore which combined with his regular pheromones, a smell I loved so much I wanted to bottle it up and keep with me forever.
I try to remember our breakfasts, our lazy Sunday mornings, our evenings on the couch, watching TV, spooning and him falling asleep nearly instantly, and me, checking in on him, “YOU’RE SLEEPING!” and him laughing and saying, “No, baby, I wasn’t.” I try to remember everything, because I am afraid that soon he will just be a photograph, that one day I won’t be able recall any of it at all.
I look at these photos over and over. They are memorized now. There he is in the military, there he is on his sister’s couch playing with the kids, there he is with his dog, there he is in front of his work, a rare selfie taken for the dating sites, looking serious and stern, but not the way he really looked in real life. It was the way he wanted to be seen, an image he was projecting. But in real life he had a coy smile, his teeth a tiny bit crooked; it was a disarming gentle smile, which revealed that his tough guy pose was just that, a pose.
There he is at Discovery Park, the day we went for a walk. These memories are turning two-dimensional and I fight to remember what happened before, during, and after the pictures were taken, even if it’s unpleasant. That day at Discovery Park, he had taken a while to come over and I was getting antsy, because it was one of the first sunny days in Seattle in early Spring and I wanted to just be outside somewhere beautiful.
He was not like me. He lived in the moment, he didn’t plan. He was fine were he was, as it was happening, a modern Buddha. He was irritated with my irritation, but it soon dissipated, as we walked through the woods down to the beach, near the lighthouse and watched the dog play in the water. He had lived here when he was married and in the military and showed me the house, pointing it out from the car on the way to the parking lot.
I look at the photo of that day and he’s wearing the olive green flannel shirt that he’d just bought from Filsons, smiling and happy, standing in front of the Sound. He’s perfect here, and I just want to crawl into the frame and stay there with him. I want to keep him as close as I can, and never let him go. When I look at the videos, the final message he sends, it is not last year, but yesterday, a week ago. Or maybe, it never happened at all.