Minnesota Goodbyes

Entry #62

The days roll on. Frozen ground thawing to the muck of spring to sun-kissed summer. And you are alone.

(There's some small comfort in that. The meanest and most meager silver lining you could come up with: You can hunker down, wary-eyed, and lick your wounds, and stare up from the bottom of this well, and be content its walls guard you. The comfort of knowing you can fall no farther, hurt no more because this is it.)

Those days are filled with you slumped on the front steps staring out over the lawn. Watching it sprout emerald and cool, only to blister from the heat, from the harshness of the summer skies. Days watching grass grow and letting the sun glare down on you. Days oppressive with heat and held-in memories.

As you stare out at the grass, a bead of sweat rolls between your breasts and down your back, and when you wipe your forehead, your palm comes away wet.

She would never feel the heat again or see the grass or study the stars. And when you think you can't bear the heat any more, bear staring out at the dying lawn, Tyler sits beside you and lights up a cherry cigar and the smoke drifts up thickly through the air. (Tyler had decided to come home for summer, and you feel him studying you, watching you through your darkness. He won't let you be, and it itches and rankles when you bother to notice, but mostly you don't. (He'd planned on doing a summer program in Boston, and though he says nothing about it, you can feel the size and shape of his disappointment: You.

You wish he'd leave because it's is just another thing you've destroyed.))

You watch it until your mind can fog over again. Before it does, he touches your shoulder.

Tyler and you on the front steps, pretending like the heat isn't driving you insane, pretending like there wasn't something fundamentally broken inside of you.

But there was and there is.

And your skin crawls at that thought, at the heat weighing on your shoulders and your mind. (Is it harder to bear than the cold? Because you'd started to forget your mittens and your coat over the winter, to let the freezing air dig its fingers into your skin, to flay you as you stood. Was that harder to bear than the heat?)

A trickle of sweat finds its way into the corner of your eye, and you scrub it away. (Too harshly, and a tear follows. And another. And Tyler sets a hand on your shoulder but doesn't say anything, and a plume of smoke rolls off his lips and everything feels like fire and heat and you're feeling something she never will.)

Now, you'll always feel something she never will.

A breath of wind fights the heat, and ruffles your hair. The breeze is momentary, though, so you shrug Tyler's hand off your shoulder and stalk back inside.

The coolness of the house brings no relief. You didn't expect it to.