If I allow myself to think about Seb, before anything else, I can hear him first. He’s not saying a thing. It’s his breathing. The sighs that said so much. His thinking noise. The weight of his pause before he’d ask a question.
I hear him and then I let myself see him. Then I just feel it. There he is. Not dead.
When you know someone really well they don’t always need to be in the room for you to communicate with. I often revel in joyful conversations with friends, just in my mind. They are right there, I have spoken to them, we have connected someway else without even saying a word. We wear our good friends like tattoos- it happens with our passions too- the things we have loved for a long time- songs and places.
When I try to move past Seb; to focus on what is ahead of me, he’s quiet and I worry that I won’t be able to conjure him up again.
Losing him has forced me to make the most uncomfortable mental pros and cons list. The glaring con looms large on the page and I scrawl the pros around it in almost illegible fashion; because I dare not confess to there being any benefits. I would much rather be as we were; but it’s not an option. There are things that will be different and they won’t sit comfortably for a long while.
This is the guilt of the living. The people left behind. The living can take up a bit more space when someone exits the carriage- there can be the tiniest relief sigh and then one of sorrow and it’s the sorrow that echoes through everything that comes next.
It’s hard to think of Seb in the past tense. With the season change I think about him out in the cold. In the wild darkness of Wuthering Heights, like the poem For the Fallen which each year echoes through November- age will not weary him.
Initially the guilt was for the responsibility of the death- I understand that this doesn’t rest with me now. It wasn’t my fault. The life guilt is ongoing, I cannot see an end, forever wrapped up in a longing for the ghost I love the most.