He doesn’t call.
He texts the next morning.
• • •
I heard your message. I’m sorry. I’ve just been really in my head lately. I’ll call tonight.
He doesn’t call that night.
Or the next.
I stop sending good mornings.
Not as punishment.
Just because I’ve run out of ways to reach across eight hundred miles to someone who has decided, quietly, without telling me, to be unreachable.
I know this.
I’ve always known this.
The wall.
That door.
The thing that’s been there since he was eleven years old and I’ve been climbing my whole life.
I thought we were past it.
I thought after everything — the truth, his father, the hospital, the goodbye, the daisies, the summer together —
I thought we had finally, actually gotten past it.
I was wrong.
Or maybe — and this is the thought that keeps me up at night more than anything else —
maybe the wall was never about me.
Maybe it never had anything to do with whether he loved me.
Maybe it’s just what he does when things get heavy.
When the dark gets too dark.
When the stuff he’s never dealt with, never actually dealt with, comes back around.
Maybe he’s drowning over there.
And I can’t reach him.
And he won’t let me.
I could deal with it if he would just let me in.
• • •
March.
