There are certain things I never, ever do.

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I never write about him on here.

Or, I never write about our love.

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There’s no proof of us now.

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Unless you know where to look.  Two busted computers, saved for the hard drives.  A tupperware box big as a bathtub, in a jewelry store storage garage in West Ocean City.  Picasa.  My blood is there, I somehow won’t take it down.

My animism, how I talk to the earth, words of rock, breath of sea, wordless vision–and rest–of trees.  An antique table in the attic.  A Grateful Dead shirt in a black plastic bag I can’t throw away.

A stack of journals.

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They made it across the country with me.  Just pulled them out of my closet.  Look in my second desk drawer.

Or Chapter 1.

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I tell my self it’s because you married her.   Out of respect, that’s why I’ve wiped us clean.

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I actually keep a totally secret blog where I can write this stuff.

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Once, in the kitchen, your mother came and begged me to stay, I was sitting midway up the stairs sobbing, her swearing she’d get you to marry me–once, right after that, I took a picture to capture the exact moment I knew you’d be taken care of  by her.  I just never thought you’d marry her.

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Why didn’t you marry me?  Name our baby after the character in our book, the reason we fell in love?

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What the fuck.  A lady never tells.

What is that?

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But I knew she’d be the good woman you needed.  Knew this even as she called to say she’d help me move out.  Maybe even knew it the first night in the old row of movie chairs in the side room at Andy’s, when I first introduced myself to her, brought up the potlucks, all you kooks playing that one shuffleboard game behind us. Knew it sure as I knew my tree in the side yard.  Where the purple crocus’ bloomed in early February, that last year.

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I. Take. Pictures. Of. Moments.

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I obliterated Facebook, no proof.

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Then there’s the whole tangled mess of how I left.  The continued wreckage of why.  Fucking Philadelphia.  Look, now these poltergeist fucking text messages–seriously, they are blank messages, just a blank fucking screen, all the fucking time–show up.  He’s saved in my phone as Douche Bag Don’t Respond.  I don’t get it, I never got it, but also.

I get it completely, it’s the myth of me.  I never knew how to explain it to you, it wasn’t verbal, but it was never, ever about Him.

That first night alone I said I’d come here, to give myself the space and breath for it all to make sense.

The lie I told myself all those years, it was about Him.  A Him!  Any one!

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Jesus Christ, it’s about me.

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Today I saw the saddest thing in the world, which is that maybe Althea died?

She is supposed to live forever.

In the place of bathtub tupperwares, gratitude, National forests, bonfires, country whiskey and old logging roads.  Not her, not her turned under, not her back to earth again.

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Ok, finally.

Not you?