Moving On

As I roll to the stop sign slowly, my phone dings and I glance at it quickly before I press on the gas. 

Our mutual friend, who we both still love dearly, but now separately, just texted me a joke about opossums. 

Tessa: 

“What do you call a group of opossums? 

A posse.”

I chuckle, and immediately lift my phone from the magnetic holder to click your face on my favorites list to dial your number. But, then I remember. And as my breath hitches in my throat, I inhale and exhale slowly as I look down both sides of the empty street. I can’t bring myself to roll into the intersection just yet. 

Now that I’ve successfully stopped myself from calling you again for the 50th time this week, I remember now that I can’t or shouldn’t call you anymore. So now I’m just sitting here, head laid back against the head rest of my car seat, taking deep breaths, and trying to will the tears back behind my eyes and force the pieces of my broken heart back into my chest.

This made me want to call you and laugh together again about that time we were dancing at sunset in the park alone. When the brush next to us began moving loudly, I was trying to get you to run away with me. (I wasn’t going to leave you behind. When I said ‘til death do us part’, I meant it, fiercely.) But you were brave as ever, “Or just stupid maybe” I would jokingly say for years to come. Now, I cringe at the mean but lighthearted joke. You waited for the little creature to pop its head out. At first we couldn’t tell what it was. We saw the general shape of its body but its head looked misshapen at first. As it came closer and closer we soon realized it just had a piece of trash stuck to its head. I was afraid of it. 

“It's a wild animal, it could be carrying diseases!!!” I told you.

You calmly and slowly continued walking towards it anyway. I tried to pull you back but you brushed me off gently. 

“It just needs a little help. Don’t worry.” You told me as you reached down, carefully holding the animal by the body and the lid stuck around its head. You smoothly pulled it off and saved the poor innocent little wild animal. You backed up to give it some space. It shook its little body, adjusting to the now empty space around its neck. It timidly looked up at you, as if to say thank you, before shimmying away. 

I had never appreciated any religion, and I always knew you hung the moon and the stars but that day you also appeared to hang the sun and create the entire universe. I knew you weren’t a god. But no one would ever be able to convince me that you weren’t created by the gods. Whoever they may be.

It was my favorite memory of us together. Because it so perfectly highlighted to me not only who I knew you were deep down. But now, looking back on it, also the pedestal that I had put you on, so that when you slipped and fell off of it, it was a very far fall.

On some base level, we all know that we die and that everyone around us will die. So society prepares us for this. They tell you that all of the emotions that you feel are part of the grieving process. There are five definitive stages to the grieving process. Those stages don’t happen in any certain order and you can go through any one of them more than once even. There’s no, one, singular way to mourn your loss. 

The pain doesn’t ever go away, but over time, the pain can lessen. And some days, even after you think you’ve healed from the loss, it can creep back up inside you and leave you feeling just as empty and broken as the moment you lost them. 

But no one ever warned me that you can mourn and grieve the loss of a person still living. Or a life for yourself that you simply can no longer have. That when you lose someone, purely due to irreconcilable differences, that you’ll want to call them all the time and have them comfort you through that loss. Because you were partners and best friends. 

Losing someone to death is a different kind of loss than losing someone to life. But they hurt the same amount. And the grieving process is incredibly similar. In fact, they may be the same. But when you grieve someone living, you have to stop yourself from calling them and crying to them to make the pain go away. You can’t ask for their help anymore or aid through this difficult process. Oftentimes the one you lose is the one singular person that you wish could be there for you anytime you lose something or someone else near and dear to your heart. When someone near us dies, calling them does no good because they won’t answer, so it’s just an empty feeling of loss. Calling someone who is living, but shouldn’t answer your calls, is a full feeling of pure pain.

As I reminded myself of all of this all over again, I shifted my foot from the brake to the gas pedal and finally pulled into the intersection. Ready to leave my old life behind, and start a completely different life in a completely different place. Because life moves on whether you want to or not. And you try to leave that part of your life behind. Maybe the whole person, and sometimes even the person that you were when you were with them. 

But no matter how far you run or what happens in life, they’ll never leave you forever. The living can carry on living their lives uninterrupted and separately from our own. But, much like the dead, the living also live on in our hearts and in our memories. We carry them forever, just like an opossum carries invisible diseases.