What Is Necessary

I didn’t write about that first night in the emergency room in December, when there was three of us, when I hadn’t yet showered and my hair was matted and sticky with something unknown.  It was not necessary to the overall story.  I would have had to explain too much. Why two of us went back the next night.  How I would later decide that love has limits and I had pushed people who loved me past theirs.  How that’s what I think it means to push people away.

It’s strange how I could write people out because they’re not necessary.  Or really because, there are no words for everything we lose.  I edited my dialogue from our walk back to the emergency room the following night.  I wrote, “I told him, ‘It’s not like the first time, in Chicago…when I had no one. I have you.  And I have friends.  For the first time since moving here I realize that I love it here because I have people to love.    [I have someone to love].  It almost makes me happy because it makes me realize how much [I have something] to be happy about.’”

I wrote, “There are no words for everything you lose.  I sat quietly in my bed for the rest of December, hugging my knees to my chest and avoiding looking at my bruises or the scrape on my ankle that wouldn’t heal.  It hurt somewhere I couldn’t reach whenever a friend texted me or called.  And I just kept repeating the same line to everyone, ‘I’m okay.’  I hated the way I sounded.” 

It never occurred to me that other people hated the way I sounded too.  That when all I could hear was the way silence and loss felt, someone would hear something else from my lips.  I will leave the conflict of multiple points of view to the fiction writers. 

I didn’t write about the last time I saw You in January, how I walked you to the subway and we smiled and kissed goodbye and said “I love you” like it was any other day.  It didn’t seem necessary to the story that I lost you then, as opposed to in December.

I didn’t write about how when I saw my friend (the third from the three of us), I felt like I was a ghost haunting my old life.  Because I hadn’t written about that part of my life.  I hadn’t written about being happy with friends in bars and at brunch.  I hadn’t written about the simple things that we all assume we’ll never lose.

And I won’t write about how He stood in the rain and said, “You need to learn to give people space,” because I don’t want to talk about how I’ve had too much space, too much loss.  Because I wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t ask for something he’s never really experienced.  Space is the way the past hangs between every syllable you let fall.  Space is measuring days – weeks – in Netflix and cocktail glasses and strangers who don’t know what is necessary to the story.

I contrived an ending out of a moment in time before he asked for space, because I felt it was necessary to the story.