Nostalgia

Perhaps there is comfort in speculating that he was as confused about who he was as I find myself.

Time has brought with it nostalgia—perhaps that is not the right word. I’ve felt more willing to revisit the past. Not in a reminiscent sense, rather with the intention of sorting through it. I’ve flipped through his journals, removed the stockpile of items that commandeered my trunk since February. I pulled the blood-crusted leather jacket from the bag the funeral home handed me. I fingered the bits of glass that remained hidden in the pockets. I stared and allowed the thoughts to come. I sat with the emptiness, I encouraged the lone tear that crawled its way down my cheek, sluggishly working its way to the hollow of my collarbone.

I did all of these things knowing they would bring forth no resolution. There was a time I’d hoped a loose paper would free itself from the confines of the pages of an old notebook, and contain the answers to the eternal question of “what went wrong?” But I’ve since accepted an errant note would likely add to the riddle he’d so carefully constructed.

Perhaps it’s a consolation that it doesn’t seem like he had the answers himself. The notes he scrawled over the years contribute to his undeveloped character, a mess of confusion and futile quests of self-discovery. The goals he’d listed just a month before the accident seemed to belong to someone else—“read 20 minutes a day” from the man who’d never touched his pile of books other than to add new ones we both knew he’d never read. There was one bullet that struck me—“say no to impulses” with the caveat of recording which urges he was able to dismiss. I sat with that note, staring at it as if the characters were about to unfurl to reveal a plethora of said diminished impulses. But as ink does, the words remained unchanged. If the affairs, squirreled away money, secret income, and unknown drug usage were deemed acceptable, what were the intrusive thoughts he’d managed to fend?