Those Sucker Punch Days Part II [BRH]

Dearest Acapulco,

I wonder if there will ever come a time when I have nothing more to say on this day. But I imagine it’ll be something I do for years to come because I know no other way to live.

But know, Brittany Rebecca, I would give up all my words to have you back with us. Every story, every post, every poem - I’d give it all away. It keeps me sane without you, but if you were here, I’d find some other way. Any other way if it meant that I could kiss the freckles on your cheek, dance with you under the tween beat of Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, and fall to the floor with you, collapsing in a heap of laughter after too many cinnamon Pop-Tarts and cans of sugary soda.

It’s been five years since your sister called me, delivering news no one is ever prepared to hear. The day is lost in a haze, buried beneath hours of shock, racing hearts, and trembling hands. But the aftermath -

The aftermath is unforgettable, seared in my brain and thrumming through my veins. I thought it’d be me someday, collapsing under a train of emotion and numbness I had no room left for. I’d wanted out for so long, it seemed, and the pit was bottomless. That all changed eventually, thank God, but it doesn’t bring you back to me.

I saw my therapist recently, one that I check in with from time-to-time for a life update, even though it’s been a few years since I felt like I was desperate to see her. She’s been incredible to me and I’m grateful to her for so much. I wish you could see how well I’m doing now, how passionate I am about life again, when I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it five, six, seven, eight, nine years ago. I wish you were here with me so we can be excited together. I don’t know if I’d still be where I am now, but I hope a wake-up call would’ve come to me in some other form, been an impetus for me to work harder at my recovery.

My therapist asked me how often I thought about you, that she imagined under normal circumstances that it was probably once a week. When I expressed that in reality, I thought about you every day, she was quiet. I explained that it wasn’t necessarily in a negative capacity - I don’t think about you always in terms of death - it just simply was. It doesn’t happen during the same circumstances or during the same time of day. In fact, it’s almost always different day-to-day.

She told me that it meant that you had a greater impact on me than she thought, which was interesting because I’ve never underestimated the influence you had on me, the power of friendship and love you still hold over me. I want more than anything to be able to talk to you, to tell you everything that’s happened to me over the last five years.

I wanna tell you about how much I love what I’m doing, how crazy I am about my job and the people I work with. I wanna complain about how I still haven’t finished my book, about how I struggle to make my characters real and not some contrived, lifeless beings on a page. I want you to help me bring them to life and yank them from the confines of a computer screen.

I wanna tell you about how I’ve fallen in love with someone unexpected, about how he makes me feel everything all at once and and has me dreaming up visions of houses with wraparound porches and vaulted ceilings and children with sticky-mouthed kisses and frizzy curls. It’s been only three months and I’m somehow simultaneously terrified of it working out and crumbling beneath my feet at the same time.

But I can’t. So maybe this will have to do until we meet again, whether in a dream or in a semblance of an afterlife.

I do dream about you nearly once a month, sometimes more, but it’s not nearly the same. In my dreams, your death hasn’t happened and we remain frozen at 19 years old. But just as I would hardly recognize the person I was then, would feel utterly uncomfortable in her skin, I crave the person you were then and grieve for the best friend I would have now. You’ve always been such a beautiful person, in more ways than I think I knew, and I think that’s a facet of you that would only grow stronger with time.

And maybe it’s easy for me to say that because time and circumstance have erased your flaws and faded any [little] fights we had into distant memories no bigger than fiction. But that doesn’t make the person I believe you’d be today any less real or true.

I love you.