Congratulations Specter of What We Once Loved!

You’re not quite there anymore.  At least, not the you that we used to know, the you we’d hold at night shivering.  Not the you we’d lean in and smell the back of the neck of.  Not the you we shuddered inside one night and murmured “I love you” to and then realized, in the seconds afterwards, that we finally understood what that meant, really meant, for the first time.

No, the you we used to know, the you we love, that you is gone.  Or, if not completely gone, occluded enough by time and space and bad blood that any distinctions, vis-à-vis your current existence, are entirely academic.

But the specter of you still rests just above each and every one of our beds.  It’s as if a stain settled on the ceiling, ages ago, and began seeping through slowly but surely, taking on your qualities while you were here and, now that you’re going, doing its best to fill in for your presence.

The stain, this pale reflection of who you once were, does not have your smell or your vision, or even hold the echo of your laugh.  But it makes it feel as if you occupy empty rooms, as if you’re always just on the other side of a wall, braced to begin laughing at a moment’s notice.  The possibility of your voice returning to our lives is so powerful that its existence, however dreamlike, has more substance to it than physical things.

Today the shadow of your shadow will be particularly noisy inside our heads.  It will invite us to open a bottle of scotch and drink the entire thing singlehandedly.  We’ll get about halfway through the bottle before your echo’s echo’s advice loses traction, undoes itself, and scotch, ever benevolent collaborator in self-destruction, carries us through and over and into sleep, where your shadow is more real, some would argue, than you ever really were.

Congratulations Specter of What We Once Loved!