#21

A late night wish to move on

There are times I wish I’d never met you.

Never taken your roommate’s offer to lend me money for the bus home and never gone to your room to tell him never mind but thank you, I’d gotten a ride with someone from off campus.

Never seen you with the grin that burst out of your face as you sat on your own bed in your own room at 8 p.m. on a Friday night, alone, with your shirt buttoned up to your chin and covered in so many clothes that I remember you, probably incorrectly, dressed in an overcoat and boots. Never been amused by you sitting there grinning as you listened to music you loved that I loved too and never invited you to the party at my house, impulsively, because you seemed so full of life.

I wish I’d never become your friend, and never held on to that friendship after I left that haunted, unhinged valley -- and the school squatting at the bottom of it -- behind. I wish I’d never heard about how impassioned you were about saving the soul of that rotting school and how beautifully you spoke about the education it had given you, pushing through the scrim of your dyslexia and delivering literature, turning on the light you didn’t know was there and making manuscripts start to push out of your skull, unformed glimmering arms and legs of potential future Athenas.

They fired your teachers anyway, and they shouldn’t have, they should have listened to you when they had the chance.

I wish I could hear “Not So Manic Now,” “All My Ghosts” and “#1 Crush” without thinking of you. I wish my friends who became your friends never went through their own muted or jagged versions of the same pain I did. I wish I’d never, with my husband, spent hours and hours agonizing over how to fit your name inside the vowels and consonants that would represent our newborn child without bursting into tears every time I called him in for dinner.

I wish I could hear news reports of strangers getting shot and just think “Oh, how terrible,” and not “Left temporal lobe,” which is where the bullet entered your brain and took your grin, your sardonic near-evil wit, your embrace, your singing voice, your constant irritations and your deep desire to fix everyone you loved, your freckles and every other piece of you that I loved so dear, away in an instant.

I wish I’d never felt your hand on the shoulder of my fear the night it appeared that I’d miscarried. I wish you never guided me in my dreams. I wish you hadn’t told me I’d marry my husband without ever having met him when we didn’t really know it yet ourselves. I wish I’d never seen magic or joy or love.

I wish I’d never vacationed with you, cleared the dishes with you, sat shoulder to shoulder with you dreaming about the future and laughing about how the hell we would ever get over our pasts. I wish I didn’t see actors from the t.v. shows you worked on and only want to hear your stories about them and your adventures.

I wish I’d never told you, the last time we spoke, that all I wanted was you to find a partner to spend your life with only to have you reply “I don’t think that’s ever going to happen for me.” I wish 3 weeks later, you hadn’t been proven right.

The only thing I do wish, sometimes, late at night, is that I’d called you back that week, or gone to visit you in L.A. like we were discussing, or somehow moved the earth and the heavens and the angle of that goddamned gun. I wish I’d changed time, set the clock off balance, set the world on fire. Maybe you would have walked into that parking lot five minutes earlier, or ten minutes later, or not at all.

I wish I’d stopped what killed you.

I wish you were here.

I wish this would stop hurting. It’s been seven years.