Day Five

There was a time when I believed that this would all work.  Or I thought I did.

It’s easy to look back and imagine rosy things, a time when everything was perfect.  It’s not that there weren’t ever moments like that.  But they were moments.

And even before Michael came here, there were doubts.  Or at least a hell of a lot of foreshadowing of things to come.  I looked at the things that I’d written in the months before Michael came here.  The paragraphs are sad, and they show so many of the things that would be problems later.  Then we called it dissociation.  Now… I wonder now if he was having some kind of porphyria spells long before he ever came here.  The physical symptoms, the weakness… those things first occurred in 2007, although it would be a long time before any of it was ever put together.  But maybe the mental symptoms, some of them, came long before.  It’s possible, although it wouldn’t change the dissociative aspects.  No one will ever know, of course.  More idle speculation.

But I see how unhappy I was so much of the time then… plus also the moments when it would seem perfect, when he would make one of those statement that would just make my heart melt.  “Let’s make everything like you imagine it.”  Because he’d mean those things, and the way that he’d say it… I’d believe him, right up to the very end.  He’d say, “everything will be all right.”  And I’d believe him.  I always wanted to believe him. 

I am so sad.  And I miss him so much.  Not the Michael of the last year, but the Michael of the past, and it breaks my heart… everything that happened, especially the last year, and I wonder endlessly if there was something more that I could have done, something that I could have done to reclaim that old Michael.  He’s right, in a way, that I abandoned him, because I couldn’t bear it.  I couldn’t bear seeing what he’d become, knowing what was going to happen one way or another.  I just couldn’t stand it.  So a lot of the time, I took my head and my heart somewhere else.

But Michael, I am so sorry.  So sorry that there wasn’t a magical key that made it all work, that there wasn’t something that I could do.  Sorry that you felt that I failed you.  Sorry that life handed you one raw deal after another.  And handed it to me, too, to us.  There is so much of me that will always belong to you, whether you realized that or not.