How to Write About You

I never write about what happened to you. 

Every other painful memory I have becomes a piece of paper and pen, crafted with the salty musk of my tears and my shaky hands, each thought I have becomes a piece of my creation, telling a story of what it all meant. 

But not you. 

 

 

Quite ironic as you were the one who pushed me to write, write, write everything. Buying me journal after journal, listening to each piece of imagination that could escape from my mind. You encouraged it no matter how juvenile, how optimistic, unrealistic sea of childish aspirations-- you listened. How could I not honor you by sewing you into my words, by making you into one of my stories. 

That. 

That is just it, you are not a story. You are not just a piece of me, something that happened to me, you do not exist in terms of myself, you are much much more than that. I did not make you into a story because it hurts. It hurts to take someone so so real, and tear them down, put them into words. Oh how narcissistic  would it be to speak of you as a piece of my fond memories and tell of how as you were torn down like a castle destroyed, a home destroyed, your mind destroyed as the cancer took away everything from me, everything from us. 

no 

 

 

As the cancer took away everything from you. There I go again, speaking of you as if all you are is something to be taken away from me. 

I do not write about you, because I do not want to diminish you to something you are not, I do not want to talk about what I lost, but what you gave. I do not write of the knot in my stomach as you couldn’t talk to me anymore because you couldn’t talk anymore. I don’t want to write about how I listened a room away when we all knew your last breaths were near. I do not write about the first visit to the hospital when you comforted me as all I could see was a future without you and when I decided that I didn’t like what I saw and that I rather have been blind. I do not talk about the day when I saw you cry, not because you were scared or sad like I was, but because you were so happy seeing everyone you loved in one room. I do not want to write about how you weren’t there at my brothers graduation and how you won’t be there at mine, wearing a dress decorated in flowers, almost as beautiful as your soul.  I do not talk about how I coped and how I learned to see days without you in them. How I went from dedicating a portion of my brain to you everyday. And how everyday turned into once in awhile, and once in awhile became rarely until I learned how not to cry for you at night.

 

 Why am I crying? 

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.

.

.

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Am I crying for you, or am I crying  for me? 

I want to write about you. 

I want to write about everything that you gave, everything you taught me. 

This is a promise. 

To write about you, and not 

About 

How I lost you.