The Days I Spent With You

Magnitude

Wall #2:

To the first woman I have ever known,

You taught me how hard and how unforgiving goodbyes can be.

In the time that we had here, you were always the person I would go to for something as small as needing to feel loved, or for something as simple as needing a smile on my face. You were the most caring and the most kind-hearted person I have ever had the privilege to know, and because of this, I have tried to live my life in the exact same way. In you, I have learned how important and how significant the moments that you spend with someone can be, no matter how short or how long you are in those moments for. Things like this are timeless.

This was my first safe place.

You taught me what it was like to be human and genuine to the greatest of my abilities and capacities, and you have shown me the amount of growth that could possibly stem from sharing all that it is you have to offer. You taught me how beautiful human beings could be, and a lot of the different ways and lights that I see this world in now have come through you.

You accepted my being; the few words I spoke and the feelings I was scared to let out. You accepted the way I chose to stay quiet in certain moments, because you knew my heart in the same ways you knew your own. I have spent forever trying to pick apart each piece of it to open mine up again.

Before you were gone you chose to set-up my life in the best way you knew how. You chose to make decisions that made me believe that you would never be gone forever, and that you would always be there, one step in front of me, as you always were. You chose to surround me with people who were supposed to be there long after you were not, and in the same way as you did, slowly and without much of a sound, they made their ways out of my life too; mistrust, disappointment and no one to turn to, again.

Before you were gone you chose to hide what was consuming you on an everyday basis; the physical and emotional pain, the weight of the world on your shoulders, and the relentless thoughts of what it would be like to say goodbye to everything we have both ever known. Now, because of the way you did this, I do the exact same thing so that everyone else does not have to know how much everything hurts.

You have taught me that this life is ever-changing. That sometimes bearing the weight so other's don't have to is something that is built inside the both of us. In you, I have been able to differentiate between the humans that we are and the souls that we have; and in one of those things, we have forever here.

That has helped me heal.

At the time, I couldn't have possibly known what was truly happening every time I walked into that room, sat beside you, and told you what happened throughout my day, so it would be easier to forget about yours. I couldn't have possibly known that your time was ticking faster than the capacity of time I was able to spend there with you.

Sometimes I can still see it. I can still see myself walking through the doors, down the stairs, to the right, straight, into the elevator, left, straight, right, and into your room. I took that same path everyday until you were gone. I took that same path because it always led me to you, and because of that, I always take the same paths now with anyone who passes me by, even if the end result is the same sort of pain. For a long time after you were gone, I had no interest in knowing what took you away from me. I had no intertest in knowing how it started, how it felt, or why. I didn't want to know your pain because I couldn't deal with the amount of it that I felt while having to process this for the rest of my life, and what made it worse, was that every year that went by, I began to understand it a little more, even if I didn't want to.

I began to understand what all of this has meant. How much rebuilding that I needed to do, and how being the boy in that hallway after seeing you only moments before you were gone was something I will never be able to comprehend.

How something and someone can be taken away from you so quickly, and how they can be strong enough to convince you that everything is completely fine, even when their time is up. I began to understand what it would look like for me to look for you in every room and around ever corner, no matter how much time has passed by. Through those processes, I realized that I can't save myself, until I save that boy who is still inside me.

Every day I am learning that I will never be good at saying goodbye.

Wall number two; a wall I have built because of the endless amount of indescribable feelings and pain that has consumed the boy that I was and the man that I am becoming. A wall built after losing everything. A wall I have built for looking around every corner. A wall I have built because every day that I left your room, you told me that I would see you at home; I never did.