Today is the 25th day since the fires and the smoke started. The deck is covered in small piles of ash, like a toddler came home from the sandbox. Even with the towels at the bottom of my doors and an air purifier constantly running, my house is still filled with smoke.
***
Things with E— blew up for almost exactly the same reasons as they did the last time, although the way in which it exploded was rather more painful than I’d expected.
“Can we talk again in a few days?” he’d asked.
“I’m not sure,” I’d replied.
We didn’t. I spent the next few weeks thinking about what I wanted from the relationship, and what he brings to my life, and whether it made sense to let it go. I thought about the dissonance between his asking if we could talk again and the radio silence that followed. I thought about the fact that I hadn’t exactly been sending talk to me signals. I texted him, saying that I didn’t want to close any doors but I was still too angry and hurt to talk. He wrote back that he didn’t want to close any doors, either.
I did my best to put it aside. I went on distance visits and Zoom calls with friends, engaging in what passes for a social life these days, and tried to get outdoors for the brief stretches the air was breathable, all the while acutely feeling the E— shaped hole in my life.
***
I can’t wrap my head around the numbers. At least 9/11 was quick. This goes on and on, no finish line in sight, and the death tolls ticks up relentlessly.
What if the AIDS epidemic had started with college students? What if it had been young, straight people dying? We forget this isn’t the first pandemic in recent memory. We forget that 30 years ago HIV was a death sentence.
***
My phone keeps buzzing with messages from people who are losing their shit. It feels like it goes in waves. One week, everyone is fine. The next, the sky is on fire. “How are you doing?” is a fraught question. We are all ok, until we realize that we aren’t, that we haven’t been, that we have no idea if we will be.
***
E— and I talked yesterday for the first time in 6 weeks. I said what I needed to say about how his actions had been hurtful, and he apologized, and then we fell right back into the kind of conversation about everything and nothing that we always have. “Dammit,” I said, “this is why I missed you.”
Because he does fit into my life, without any fuss or finicking, as though he’s always been there. And yet. We do not speak the same love language. It leaves me in a strange place, where I have an unshakeable belief that he loves me and cares about me but feel like it’s rarely expressed in a way I understand.
“Goodnight,” he says, as we hang up the phone. “Sleep tight. Keep breathing. Don’t catch on fire.”
I love you too, I think.