A year and change later

 What is the difference between waiting and healing? Time moves on, and without noticing, I guess I do too. 

My last memory of you is steeped in messiness, in the juxtaposition of our two paths, in the many ways I learned how to be worried about you. It's sunken beneath the surface that no matter what I tried and no matter how self aware you might have been, it still wasn't enough to make it possible for you show up for me. 

I suppose that's my biggest problem, isn't it? I don't want anything more than I want people to show up for me. Does that go along with a fear of abandonment? What about the constant, easy hope I get in the pit of my stomach that if given another chance one more chance, someone who hasn't shown up before will show up this time? 

How many things are we addicted to, and we don't even know it? Am I addicted to being adjacent to trauma? 

You. What do I think of you? I talk about you the way I talk about all the people I've loved, I give you all the credit in the world, I allow you room to grow, even if it means shrinking my own role in the relationship. What stage of grief, of processing, is this? The one where I look back with melancholy for the person I limited myself into being when I was with you. 

What's the word for when you've never felt more understood by a single person in your life, but you're also constantly terrified they might leave at any second? If only I could be on my best behavior just a little bit better, then maybe they would stay. Then maybe he might show up. 

I'm writing this, and yet somehow it feels (again) like I'm writing a letter to my dad. In a way, I kind of thought I was finished writing things about him, especially since I haven't talked to him in a while, not really. 

What is it to be so impacted by another person, so desperate to be around them, to be what they like, and yet to be absolutely terrified of them at the same time? I still have the flowers he got for me, mainly because they somehow haven't wilted an died yet. And because the vase that my grandmother let me keep looks prettier with flowers in it. Baby's breath, I knew as soon as I saw them. The white kind, the kind you can get at any grocery store. I do like flowers, that isn't the point. And baby's breath, it makes me think of weddings and of mother's day, and when I looked it up