Dear Trevor

You all know him as the Last One.

On a long enough timeline, names get named.

He emailed me this past week.

He got a new phone. Asked for my number, but said he’d understand if I didn’t want to give it to him.

Left me wondering if he was fresh out of the last relationship and not quite into the next. I am the empty space between his monkey bars. He hasn’t yet learned that serial monogamy is a slow death of who you could be, who you actually are, away from someone.

Normally I would muster my politeness and kindness. Message him back, reassure him that I am okay, make sure he was okay.

But I paused.

For a few days, I paused.

Never done that before.

He and I are on some discernable schedule, wherein I randomly pop into his head and he emails or texts. I can’t find a pattern to it, never looked at it very closely.
I text back, if he’s drunk it gets sexual. I stop it. Or it remains civil until it peters off until I once again pop into his head.

The timing of his checking in stopped me. It was the 2 year anniversary of the week we spent an amazing few days together. Consummated and labeled the relationship. I met his friends and family. We went to the quarry with my friends and made plans for the next weekend. But he never showed. Blocked me on everything and disappeared without a word.

I opened the email with fresh Facebook memories in my head. I mean I usually mark certain anniversaries in my head. The Christmas Eve I met Giant. Thanksgiving and Paddy’s day with the Hulk, those are easy to remember. But other days of personal significance are celebrated or mourned as well. But in this instance I was somehow gifted with the ability to pull way back, out of my own muddled head and see very clearly the timeline and decisions I made between then and now.

I am here because of him.

I sent him this instead of my number.

Unfinished Symphonies

I am prone to own every decision, every move I make, good or bad. Even if it isn’t me that ends things, I take my share of the responsibility plus a bit extra to be safe. And I do with this as well. Moving to a different time zone on a cold grey rock in the Atlantic is a pretty huge life choice to make over a break-up.

But that isn’t exactly it. I got on the plane to come here as a last-ditch effort to salvage my friendship with Panda. But it made it worse.
I got on a plane because the Ti-Cats lost that season so I had two weeks off. I got on a plane because a batch of beer wasn’t ready to be bottled at my other job and I had 2 weeks off.
I got on the plane to come here because I had become Bella in the second Twilight where the seasons changed outside her bedroom window but she didn’t move. Just wrote sad things and woke up in the night screaming in the bed they had shared. I think I watched a lot of Twilight that month as well.

I got on the plane because I couldn’t keep sleeping in the bed I had shared with him in the room I had set up for the two of us. Everything placed with him in mind. Room for the dog, bed up against the wall away from the window. Painted the prettiest most soothing teal. He was never in that house.

He messaged me on my second trip out here. Said he would be at that house with flowers the next morning. Wanted to take me out proper, start over. But I didn’t live there anymore. Just added an extra touch of what the actual fuck to the surrealness of driving through the Maritimes in the dark on the way into whatever this is.

What happened once I got here is not his fault, no more that you can blame any catapult for where exactly the rocks land, or if they get made into houses after they are thrown.

I am not who I was before the trauma of him. Or the ones that came before, and I am sure the next catacalysmic event that occurs will change me one more time. I am molten and moving. But at some point, from all of this pressure, I will become a diamond. Hard and cold and beautiful.

I sat at the bar on Tuesday, reminiscing with an old friend. We fight sometimes, go long periods without talking or seeing each other. Then on some magical nights, when the moon is just right, we talk, and laugh and enjoy each other’s company. On nights like those, and others (when the moon is full and blue), I am grateful.

There is one thing I am certain of in life. Well 2 really.

Everything is as it should be, because it is.

And at some point, just as crystal clear as the path that led me here appeared to me the other day, the reason for me being here will show itself too. Sooner than later if the portents are correct.

It has been a bizarre journey. Fraught with peril, sadness and fuckboys of epic proportions.

But all god does is watch us and kill us when we become boring. We must never ever be boring*.

I was talking to the Big Bad Wolf a few days ago. I am afraid and I am trying to reconcile my fear.

“I’m not entirely comfortable with how I feel at the moment but I am also someone who runs towards the inexplicable and overwhelming.”

This IS who I am and what I do.

So thank you my darling Trevor trebuchet, the rocks that were carelessly thrown have become a foundation for something that still has to play itself out.

At least I am not boring.

Chuck Palahniuk*