Disappearing.

 Sitting an ocean away, on another summer of work via escapism (or is that vice versa), I've finally slowed down to process the past year.  The threats to unalive me from students, my resignation from there, my words being taken out of context (perhaps purposefully) in my day-to-day life and not even personally, to a three-word text, and being back together two weeks later, to being ghosted in the cold squalls of mid-February.  My head still spins at it all, especially with how busy I've been this year.  Though, as these things go, dreams and missed ones cross the mind's eye.  I'm still numb and waking up from the emotional coma.  It's not the emotional coma of 2020-1, but it hits different without a coherent definition or design.    

While in France, I found a sense of peace one day.  I was so at ease and comfortable while kayaking that when someone asked where I was from, I answered something else.  Girls on the kayak away responded, with snickers, as I tried to take a moment to regroup my thoughts.  I understood the question, yet I needed a minute to answer it in a tongue, not my native.  This moment, snark and all, is a metaphor for much of my life.  

I'm still trying to catch my breath and not remember when.  While in Paris this past June, I stopped dead as I looked at love locks.  A white Jeep rolled down the way (an American Jeep in Paris!), and all I could think of was why I had to see that here! It took me a minute to catch my breath on Pont des Arts.  As if one queue, like a basic tragic movie soundtrack would, sad lyrics ran through my head.  "I wouldn't want to marry me either," echoed its painful bridge chords through my mind.  I could feel them in my spine and toes as I sighed.  I wonder when the day will come that I stop running into memories of him around corners, in shops, and in the occasional bar I enter.  

In Marseille, I kept myself busy and my mind at bay.  Yet, with a poetic full moon one night, I woke up to it shining brightly through my window.  I sat up and curled into my knees, somewhat shocked that I did, and I longed for him next to me.  I hadn't let that thought cross my mind in months.  Yet, there I sat with it echoing in the corners and forefront.  No matter where you go, the memories are still there, always when you least expect them.  

I still see our lives flash from time to time.  Like last week while picking up groceries in Athens.  Literally, as I turned an aisle corner, I looked up to fire logs at eye level.  I stood there sighing, "When will I stop seeing him wherever I go?" as I pushed that memory down like we did those Moscow Mules our final night last summer.  When things happen, good or bad, I still sometimes want to tell him first. I sigh.  

Bourbon, my dog, finally started sleeping on his side of the bed again.  In June, right before I left him at his summer home for the summer he surrendered to our new reality.*  More than a year after he started smothering me and refusing to sleep on someone else's side of the bed, still looking for him and wagging his tail at his voice, all the while sometimes stealing his hoodie or tee for a pillow when I wasn't in them, my little rescue gave up the goat on the man he nestled into at night to remain snug between us, on him while seeing me.  The things we can't unsee.  My little 80-proof knows.  

Almost a year and a half into the dance it ended with a ghost's echo of literal proportions, and my heart can't stomach the thought of bothering again.  My track record reeks of the Renaissance Faire we went to last August: underwhelming, crowded with misguided signs, and overpriced merchandise crammed on shelves leaving much to be desired and us to wonder what the hoopla was all about.  Apparently, we've been told we got a dud day, and I ponder what about me makes me the continual dud in finding life's design in relationships and myself.  These are the questions I avoid asking, the ones that surface on a full moon's night and in the moments when the guard is down and grocery store aisles turn into metaphorical landmines of memory and heartache.  

Travels back to Greece, and while here, I've been reading travel literature and fiction, crafting pitches, and preparing for an interview.  While working to regain me, a friend saw me yesterday and sputtered, "Annessa, you look like you're disappearing."  I'm thinner, you see, and the mix of language syntax is a perfect metaphor as I see it.  As I walked home yesterday is the anticyclone heat of what we've named Charon and barely avoided melting, I thought about how we all disappear into ourselves, lives, loves, and losses.  Sometimes it is healthy, often not.  Part of me disappears knowing I'm not moving West, and the prolonged thoughts of marrying him, after he brought it up more than once, stand frozen in time.  Neither is happening, and a part of me is lost to that memory.  I've disappeared into the fight to compartmentalize and push forward. The depression of loss awoke me at night, made my days hazy and lonely, and left Bourbon as my champion of companion and sanity. Bourbon disappears into cuddling his person, rarely leaving her side and wondering why she's not the same anymore.  

The disappearance of time and place are not the same.  The disappearance of ourselves evolves and changes over time.  As I spend another eternal summer under the Grecian sun, I profoundly wish I didn't have to leave and make plans to relaunch a life, my lost relationship and life disappear into the pages read and written, the stories I tell, and the dreams of reality and landscape of the present.  

*Bourbon's summer home is my parent's house.