Purging Colin

Over the past two weeks I have been writing like crazy. I've been writing about Colin, wanting to commit our history here. I had it all planned out, plotted and narrated, with some hot dialogue and even some girl-on-girl action.

I was going to share all of it: the excitement of my first live-in relationship, my first poly-amourous relationship, my first opportunities to be loved and challenged and make grown-up decisions. My first marriage, and my first really big failures in life.

I have pages and pages of our history, and I just can't post it. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't represent what he meant to me, what life meant to me back then. I can't relate to the girl I'm writing about; when I re-read it after a couple of days of letting it sit, it felt like I was reading something someone else had written about someone else's life.

Maybe that has happened because of all the healing I've done. Maybe it has happened because I have more healing to do. I don't know, except that it doesn't feel creative and sexy and demonstrative. It feels like I sat down and forced myself to write and what came out was loose, runny shit. Like the kind you get when you have too much lactose.

Each year as I approach the anniversary of Colin's death, I get a little crazy. My sleeping patterns change; my body feels unhappy. My brain hurts and I get leaky in the eyes over everything. Sometimes I can be more philosophical about it than others. This year, I'm remembering how I felt in the few days before his death.

He'd been travelling for work, was in the Bay-area working on a PC/software upgrade for a bank chain. He was gone through the week, and home on weekends. I was doing more socializing than normal in the evenings, spending time with friends to fill up the quiet hours of the evening so I wouldn't feel so lonely.

Two days prior to his death was a Wednesday; I had met my closest girl friend at that time for drinks at a restaurant on the Columbia River, a favourite hangout called McMenamin's. We drank cosmopolitans and caught up with each other's lives. She asked me how things were going with buying a house -we'd been recently approved for a home loan- when my mood turned suddenly extremely dark. I remarked that we were probably never going to buy a house. Colin was too immature, too irresponsible with money to actually follow through with such grown-up plans as purchasing a whole house. I told her that things were never going to be the same again; that life had gotten as good as it was going to, and I didn't have much to look forward to. I told her that Colin and I hadn't been communicating well, that things had been tense between us since the abortion, and that things generally weren't working out.

It shocked me, what I was saying. Some of them were true -things had been tense between us and we did sometimes disagree about money and our future plans- but they weren't things I would have classified as "problems". We were dealing with them, regularly talking about the stress between us and in our lives in a way that seemed healthy. I remember us looking at each other then, both a little stunned at what I had said. We burst out laughing and moved on to other topics, drinking and chatting and enjoying each other's company; but I felt wrong. I had a black, oily feeling inside my heart and I didn't know why. I eventually shrugged it off as anxiety that my husband was out of town and I was lonely without him, but the feeling stuck with me over the following couple of days and I couldn't shake it no matter how hard I focused on other things.

My brain is filled with those feelings again, my body veritably vibrating with the need to shout that things are going to be bad soon. I'm bad-tempered and wrong-headed, just like I get every year.

This afternoon I'm going over to Bunny's house. She's going to cut my hair into something very sexy. She lost someone too, six days before I lost Colin. We're observing our respective deaths by doing something fun that we enjoyed doing with our dead people: roller skating.

I think I'll probably fall down a lot. I'm actually looking forward to some physical pain to remind me that I'm alive. I'm not dead, and just because someone that I loved once is, that's not a good enough reason for me to be brain-sick.