I'm home this week so Miss N can spend Halloween trick or treating with her cousins. I've also been tasked with helping to get things ready to go for Thanksgiving next month, which means cleaning out closets and crawlspaces and helping rearrange things. Last night, I was moving some stuff in the attic when I came across a box of stuff from my late teens/early twenties. It contained some notebooks from high school with various random rants and drawings, and a couple of day planners that I bought but never used. It also contained some pictures and video of that point in time. The last pictures and video ever taken of the girlfriend and I before she passed away. *sigh*...If it ain't one thing, it's another. I've very slowly been getting better when it comes to thinking and talking about her and our time together. It's common knowledge that for years I hid behind booze and other substances to avoid dealing with it all. Then I had no choice but to deal and I had no idea just how long that would actually take. I finally hit a place of acceptance about three years ago, but was still unable to really talk about any of it at length or look at old photos. Last year I finally put an old photo of her up, albeit in a rather obscure place, and that's been somewhat cathartic. It's taken 11 years for that kinda progress. Eleven years. My sister, however, is nowhere near the same place of acceptance. They were best friends for a long time and she was the godmother to my sister's oldest kid. The stress and shock of everything that happened during that period sent my sister into very premature labor and I think she really blocked out everything that happened. She doesn't talk about it with anyone and, as far as I know, has rarely gone back to look at old photos of the two of them.
My assistant in cleaning out the attic is my sister's oldest, who was 3 when her godmother passed away and is now 14 and curious about the person she never knew. We talk about her every now and then but I know she hasn't gotten as much info as she'd like. Her eyes lit up when she saw the video and she practically begged to watch it. I couldn't say no. And honestly, I was curious to see what was on it. The two of us dug out a VCR player, put in the tape and pressed 'Play' at around 11 PM. About twenty minutes in, my brother-in-law wandered in and began watching with us. Ten minutes after that, my sister sat down. There was this sort of intentional silence amongst all of us for the next little while. I don't know what the reason for that was with them but I just wasn't sure what to say. It was mostly just goof off video we'd taken with my mom's old camera of us singing along to various stuff, and sitting around having conversations on mock talk shows. The niece had a million questions about her, now having seen the personality that her godmother had. In a way, her questions reminded me of all of the good things and that made them easier to answer. But there was still this underlying sadness about how all she'll ever have are secondhand stories. It should be so different. As we inched towards the end of the tape, all four of us were laughing and swapping stories about her. It was kinda great. Everyone else went to bed and I stayed up for another few minutes going through the box. The girlfriend and I had made a ton of videos. We were both interested in all things creative and always said we'd edit our pursuits into something decent one day. I knew this particular tape could hold 6 hours of footage (and we always used every minute of every tape) but the four of us had only watched about 2 so I kept fast forwarding. The next thing on that tape was a conversation that she and I had when she came out for a visit during our college days. I didn't even know she was filming and, given the placement of the camera and the topic of conversation, I'm not sure she knew it either. Most of the convo was too private to relay here, but one part of it caught my attention more than any other. She asked where I saw us in ten years (this was in 2001). My answer was that we'd, of course, be together, both be doing what we loved and maybe be working on having a kid or two. I said I wanted our relationship to evolve and have been drama-free for a looooong time before kids entered the fray. She laughed. I asked her the same question and she avoided it, saying she hoped we'd still be together because she could never see herself with anybody else. She said she loved me and would continue to until her dying day and then for eons after that. Then she jokingly confirmed that I loved her and I said I'd loved her from day one and would love her until the end. Unbeknownst to us, the clock was already ticking and the end would arrive almost a year to the day after that video was shot. That is...eerie.
I went to bed after watching that but I didn't really sleep much. I tossed and turned a lot. I had foggy dreams and thoughts about everything I'd just watched. And now I'm just sad. Because I miss her. She was my best friend and my sounding board. She made me better in a lot of ways. I look back at the aftermath now and I wonder how I even got through it all. Something, or someone, had to be propelling me forward because I was not at all strong enough to handle all of that on my own. I'm still not, really. I've said it before but it doesn't feel like all of this was so long ago, and yet it does. It's like I can feel in my bones how long ago it was and how difficult it was and how it probably took years off my own life. But my mind doesn't always remember all of that. It's weird. But I'm thankful we were doing so well when everything happened because there was nothing unresolved between us and nothing left unsaid. We both really did love each other til the end.
