Harrison, Harry, My Love

Tw: substance abuse, mental health, cussing

To: Harrison 

My therapist said I should write you a thank you note. A THANK YOU NOTE. Un-fucking-believable. What am I supposed to say? Thank you, for leaving me? Thank you for breaking my heart into thousands of pieces and stomping on them in your wake? 

How is she even allowed to have a degree? A thank you note. It makes more sense to write you a “fuck you” note. God. 

Thank you, Harrison. Thank you so much for being the perfect fiancé until you weren’t. Thank you for being so goddamn beautiful I felt like I was with an Adonis. Your dark hair somehow always flattering, even if it was a mess after sleeping, even if it was unruly after you took me exactly the way I wanted, after my hands had run through your thick curls, tugged, pulled, held onto your perfect locks like an anchor as you brought me over the bridge of blinding pleasure. 

Fuck. 

Thank you, for having eyes so dark and gorgeous it felt like I was stargazing every time we shared a look. We could have an entire conversation in those looks: words and feelings reflected in the cosmos of your eyes. You taught me how to understand wants, desires, hesitations, fears, with a single glance. 

I hate you. 

And this isn’t making me feel better. 

So thank you for making me cry again. You probably couldn’t even read this godforsaken "thank you" note. I’ve barely kept between the notebook lines, you know. The world is so blurry. It has been blurry ever since you walked out the front door, out of my life. I don’t know how I haven’t run out of tears. My eyes are so swollen they hurt, my face so dry nothing will soothe it. The tears, they have carved a trail on my cheeks that I can’t scrub away no matter how hard I try. That’s what you’ve left me with. Stains on my cheeks and tears in my eyes. 

No longer yours, 

Marina

------

For: Harrison

It’s been about ten days since I last wrote you a “thank you.” Not that I’m counting. 

Alright. You got me. That’s a lie. You always could tell when I was hiding something (I never did want to burden you with how I felt, you know, and you'd hold me and tell me that was dumb. You wanted every part of me, the good, the bad, the ugly).

I’ve been counting ever since you’ve been gone. It’s 38 days, today. Six hours. I’m not so insane I know it down to the minute. 

Shit. You know that’s a lie too. Six hours. Four minutes. You left me at 8:23 in the morning on March sixteenth. 8:23 haunts me. It fucking haunts me, Harrison. 

I haven’t been able to focus. On anything. My students are suffering, you know. Learning less because I can’t find any reason to teach them what a Punnett square is. They don’t care. Neither do I. 

I’ve carried on like normal in my classroom. But they’re tenth graders. They can tell something’s off. There’s no light behind my eyes, no bounce in my step. You took all that with you. You took everything. My light, my heart, my smile. 

I still cry every day, until I’m choking and gasping. You left some sort of hole where my lungs should be. I can’t breathe anymore. I haven’t been able to breathe since you left. Thank you, Harrison, for the mounting medical bills. They told me it was a panic attack the first time. The second time, they told me to get a therapist. My therapist put me on a cocktail of this and that. I don’t even know how to pronounce some of them. 

I don’t have very good insurance, you know. 

I find that pot works just as well. Better even. But that’s not cheap either. I can’t wait for summer. A paradise season with no obligations and I can lay around in a haze of smoke and potato chips. And cry. Winston doesn’t even make me feel better anymore. I just cry into his soft, black fur. He’ll purr and he’ll cuddle and he’ll try his best. But it never makes the ache go away. 

So thank you, Harrison. For leaving me a shell of myself. 

Missing you and I hate it, 

Marina

-----

Dear Harrison, 

It’s been 91 days since you’ve left. Cami (she’s my therapist, you’d like her, I think. She’s outside the box, introspective, makes me think deeper, much like you did) says that I’m improving. I think she was right. The thank yous have helped. If nothing else, I can be mad at you in solus instead of sniping at my students or screaming at my sister or cussing out my friends. 

So, thank you, for giving me an outlet. Though, I suppose that’s not a thank you to you. It’s a thank you to Cami and to my pen and my soft leather journal. 

To you, Harrison, I still say thank you for ruining my life. I’ve spent all my savings on marijuana and gin, you know. Tried some mushrooms. We always wanted to do those together. It was nice, I guess. 

But when the high was gone and the euphoria bled out and the colors dulled, I just fucking cried. Until I was so tired I couldn’t move. 

So now I just keep drinking and smoking and petting Winston. I’m crossed as I write this. Don’t tell Cami and don’t tell my sister. They’d both be so disappointed and I can’t handle the fucking condescension. They don’t know what it’s like. No one does. 

So thank you, Harrison for driving me to rock bottom. Thank you for helping me understand that I can be alone. That I only ever want to be alone. 

God. 

It’s 8:23. I haven’t slept in over 30 hours. You haunt me. Your brilliant smile, your introspective questions, the way your arms wrapped around me, your fingers gently stroking my arm when I was sad or when we watched that stupid TV show. 

I don’t even think I can properly be sad anymore. All I can feel is the absence of you. 

So thank you, Harrison. Thank you for taking away my emotions. And I think I mean that. I don’t like to feel. I don’t want to feel anything anymore. 

~Marina 

----------

Dear Harrison,

It’s my last first holiday without you. First, it was the fourth of July. I watched the fireworks. We always liked to watch them together. I held Winston tight in my arms until my forearms were barely more than bloodied shreds. He doesn’t like fireworks. But I couldn’t stand to hear the earth-shattering booms or the glorious colors with only me and my bottle of gin. 

Celebrate with Gia, Cami said.

Gia has been trying her best to be there for me. But every time I look at her, at my baby sister, all I can feel is this searing, clawing jealousy. Because she is happy. She is married. And she’ll never know what it’s like to have your only friend be the bottom of a liquor bottle. 

I didn’t want to see the fireworks with Gia and her husband and their fat little son. They’re all so fucking happy and I hate it. 

I hated it on the fourth, I hated it on my birthday, I hated it during Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

New years didn’t suck so much. I was able to leave the house. I found a club that was having specials for the new year and projecting the ball drop on this huge white screen. I danced and drunkenly counted down with everyone and drowned myself in their glittering sickly sweet cocktails. 

I even made out with someone. But then I sobbed into his black v-neck shirt. It was Versace. He smelled like you. And he took me home. Not for anything uncouth, though I think I probably would have. He just walked me to the front door.

He left me his number in case I needed anything. I left it on the kitchen table. It might still be there, collecting dust. I don’t know. There’s so many bills and ashes and dying plants on that table. All it does is collect things I can’t put away. And dust. And cat hair.

And now, it’s my first Valentine’s without you: our anniversary, you remember? And I’m looking at Facebook. And Gia is so happy—her husband is such a romantic. You were never one for grand gestures. But you made me feel special in your own way, and we had so much fun building our blanket fort and being goofy and laughing. 

Jesus, the way you’d make me laugh. 

I don’t think I’ve laughed in ten months, twenty-nine days, thirteen hours. And four minutes. I don’t think I can do it anymore. Not really. Not genuinely. It hurts to laugh like that. Not in the way where you’ve laughed so hard for so long that you have to clutch your belly and your cheeks hurt and you’re overwhelmed with so much happiness that the world and everything in it is gilded, just for a bit. 

It hurts to laugh in the way that it hurts to be stabbed. 

So thank you, Harrison, for making me hate joy. 

I can’t do this without you,

Marina

-------

Dear Harry, 

I couldn’t write you a thank you on the day you left. It hurt too much, you know? You took my heart, my lungs, my laughter, my everything. I have been a shell. Cami says I got worse. Way worse. She said it in the way that therapists do, gently but firmly like a mother scolding her child. 

I couldn’t write you a thank you note for another year after. 

I don’t know what made me do it. I don’t know how I was able to drag myself out of our—my—little two story house. But I went to one of those meetings. One of those AA meetings and one of those grief meetings. For people who can’t function because that grief pulled them under and kept drowning them every time they tried to break the surface for a breath, please just one fucking breath of fresh air. 

I go every week now. Almost every day. 

And I’m learning to forgive you. For doing what you did every day. Getting up at seven, making me coffee and breakfast, kissing me on the forehead. I’m learning to forgive you for going to work on March sixteenth, just ten minutes later than you normally left because it was your birthday and I took the day off, and I wanted to kiss you long and hard and curl up in your arms just a little longer. 

I guess, really, I’m learning to forgive myself. Because it wasn’t your fault, was it? Not leaving later, not your car tumbling six times (because that driver was speeding so goddamn fast and who would have time to react?), not for the knock on our door as I had your birthday cake cooling on the counter, nor the screams that scraped against my throat. Not for leaving me so numb and drunk and full of encompassing rage. 

It was all my fault. 

Everything that I’ve done to myself. It was all me. 

And Gia, thank fucking Christ, has forgiven me. She’s the only one who stuck around when all I could do was drink and cry and scream at anyone who tried to help. 

I am so different. I think you would be disappointed in me. And maybe that’s why I finally stopped crying. I haven’t cried in almost two weeks now. Are you proud of me? 

I’m trying to be better. You’ve been gone two years now, and I’m almost thirty and life keeps going on. I think you’d want me to keep going on too. So I’m laughing a little more. I’m drinking a lot less. 

But I still hear your voice and feel your arms around me and smell your cologne. I think these imprints will never leave me. 

I finally took off the ring you gave me, when you promised me forever. 

I wear it around my neck now. I still cry sometimes, when I touch it. But now, I feel…solace. Thank you, Harrison, for always being with me. For always comforting me. 

Thank you, my sweet Harry, for giving me a love so true and real and warm that it broke me when you were gone. Not many people get to experience that sort of profound heartbreak. I don’t know if they should. People deserve to be happy and in love and to dance with their partner and laugh so hard the world turns golden. 

I am lucky to have had that. To have had something so powerful the loss is carved into my bones. I know this heartbreak is a good thing. Because it means you were my soulmate. And I was loved.

Thank you, for being the kindest, funniest, sexiest, sweetest man I ever had the fortune to spend a fraction of my life with. 

Thank you for loving me. 

I still have that man’s number, the one I sobbed on a year ago. I think I’ll call him, if that’s okay? I’ll never be able to replace you. I’ll never be the same without you. But I want to build pillow forts again, and I want Winston to have a father figure around (he meows so much, you know? He misses you as dearly as I do), and I want to feel everything fully again. 

My heart is back in one piece and I can finally breathe. I think I’m ready. But I’ll still write you, my love. I’ll still thank God and the universe every day that I was lucky enough to get to know you and love you. 

But I think I have to let go a little. 

So thank you, for letting me do that. Thank you, my love, for being everything I ever needed. Thank you for teaching me that it is better to love and be loved and to lose it, than to never have loved at all.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

Love, 

Marina