the habit of being

Today I taped up this box of some of James’ stuff I’d had sitting on the table waiting to mail for a week. It’s been sitting there since the last time I talked to him, which was longer ago than we ever went without talking in the entire five and a half years we knew each other. There’s this tiny little sketch pad in there where he drew pictures of me lying on our bed, and where I left him a note saying that he was late coming home and I was kindof worried but that I was going to work and would be back by such and such time, love Katharine. His socks and all his bathroom stuff. His contact lens case. The USB cable for his digital camera, which he’d asked for on instant messenger before we stopped talking, because he hadn’t uploaded the last batch of pictures he’d taken of me and wanted to get them off of there before someone in his family got curious about what was on the camera. I’d said he had more nude photographs of me on his computer than he would ever need or want, so why didn’t he just delete them.

I guess you only get to take the last picture once. My last pictures of him were on that camera too, and I’m never going to see them again. And I’m never going to see him again. And though I can understand us breaking up (we killed each other on a daily basis - there are certain things a relationship just can’t survive), but how can you can love a person that much and one day just have them completely out of your life, without really even wanting to let them back in? I never really believed it was possible, in all those years I never thought it would happen, and the more trauma we went through together, the more unlikely it seemed that we’d ever be separate. One day you’re coming home to the same face you’ve come home to every day, the same person who’s heard every single one of your stories and knows your entire history and all your favorite books and all your moods and your touches and the shadows that you make, the way that you move, your voice, your skin, your smell, all the different ways you can moan, the faces you make when you cry, your scream, your blood, your love.. and the next day, it’s just you, and you can’t decide what’s worse - never wanting to go through anything like that again, or wanting to go through all that again more than anything else in the world, with someone else.