Bridges and Impeccable Cursive

the grace in admitting defeat

I folded the papers she handed me as I walked out of her office, hitching breath and baby steps down the white walled hall.

I didn't want to leave.

The lady at checkout smiled at me and greeted me by name.

They know me.

They prayed for me.

I set an appointment for two weeks, knowing I wouldn't find the strength to see her again so soon.

This isn't healthy.

You need to get out.

I tucked away the printout she had typed up for me, the handwritten instructions on how to leave, then stood in the damp next to his car until the tears were indistinguishable from raindrops.

♤

It wasn't the paper I took out at your memorial.

When I arrived our friend wasn't there yet and I didn't know what to do so I did what I always do.

I made use of myself.

I swallowed the agoraphobia shaking my bones and introduced myself to someone laying a tray of food on fold out tables. Funeral potatoes. You would have laughed.

She told me she didn't know what needed to be done. She looked almost as lost as I felt and my heart quaked as I wondered how she knew you.

A voice behind her said the book needed your name.

Someone had to write your name in a book.

None of them wanted to write your name in the book.

I'm not sure they had even said your name yet.

I wrung my hands and walked to the tiny round table strewn with flowers and sailor moon stickers.

And the book.

There wasn’t much in my bag but I found a scrap of paper next to my five year old exit strategy, an old prescription from LensCrafters. I grabbed a purple pen from my purse and I wrote your name.

It wasn't good enough.

I wrote it again.

Our friend would be here soon. Your brother from another mother except she was your mother too.

She arrived first.

I offered a hug she accepted, and I listened while she told me you were too good for this world.

I wrote your name again.

It wasn't good enough.

I shuffled dishes and laid out napkins as people with grief far more profound than mine greeted and held each other.

I wrote your name again.

And again.

I wrote your name 10 time and each time I felt worse, tears I had no right to shed stinging the corners of my eyes.

NO

No.

You're not here for that.

On the eleventh try, I stopped and stared at the book as my eyes threatened to glass over.

Impeccable cursive.

♤

I hid the exit strategy from my husband in the drawer in my room. He never went to my room. Every morning when I woke up I would unfold it and stare at the numbers begging me to pick up the phone.

YWCA.

Bridges.

Annabelle's House.

Crisis Center of Little City.

Start putting cash away.

Make sure your vital documents are in your possession.

Pack an overnight bag.

Pack two.

Don't forget your meds.

♤

I don't have to tell you how proud our friend is of his handwriting.

You know better than I do.

You probably witnessed as he refined it until it could only be described as calligraphy.

I did not put your name in the book.

After the 11th try I folded the paper back up, I put the pen in my purse, and I waited for his impeccable cursive.

When he arrived, he was swarmed.

I waited.

He was so broken, barely existing on this plane, distracted by looking for the spaces you occupied. I can hardly imagine there's a corner of that bar you didn't overwhelm with your radiance over the years.

I don't think there's a reality that would have allowed the two of us to meet.

Something else would have had to end to allow a beginning like that, and we're far too self sacrificing.

♤

When COVID hit the shelters filled and I breathed a sigh of complacent relief.

I could give myself permission to keep coping now.

By then I had met you and him and everyone casually related to our corner of the internet, and none of you knew.

I didn't want you to know.

I didn't want to fight.

I wanted to cope.

I'll be the stupid useless lazy cunt but gods above don't make me fight.

don't make me fight.

♤

He didn't recognize me right away, I was wearing a mask. But I put my arms around him anyway because knowing me wasn't the point.

We were all there for him.

We were all there for you.

I'm not sure if it had registered yet who I was when I took his arm and led him to the book.

Four years gone but our first face to face.

I told him it needed your name, and we waited for him to write it.

There's little film left in my visual memory but watching his hand shake with that pen in his hand, watching him take a firm breathe to quiet his nerves and still his fingers, watching him perform his impeccable cursive invoking your name on paper, watching him throw the pen down and turn away.

Grief and a book and impeccable cursive and a name that will never mean anything but you.

♤

You all figured it out before I had to say it.

But I did it.

I told our community I was being abused and I didn't know what to do.

I knew you were in pain.

We were all in pain.

But we found a way to get my children safe.

And you left five months later.

I'll never forgive myself for believing you had what you needed.

I certainly never believed you'd need me.

♤

They called you the Patron Saint of Junkies but the tongue in cheek was for the sake of absurdity.

You were the Patron Saint of Unrequited Agony.

The people you served were addicts but that was a symptom, not the cause.

You saw the woman who lost her babies to a violent husband.

You saw the war vet who watched his brother in arms reduced to mist.

You saw the quiet trauma of those who believed themselves to be failures instead of victims of a cruel and injust reality.

You saw me too, and you called me brave.

I wish you were right.

♤

There's nowhere left to turn.

I have run out of options.

Our society's desperation to keep the poor in poverty has left me defenseless, and I promised I wouldn't succumb.

I know you promised too.

But we aren't the same.

I saw my end on the horizon when I was twenty years old and I made a choice.

I had a child, because without an anchor I was going to die.

Terrible reason to have a child.

But she's a goddamn miracle and I'm the only parent she has.

I cannot sleep.

I cannot succumb.

Today I admitted defeat and I went looking for the exit strategy.

It's seven years old now.

It's been almost two since you died.

I knew I still had it in my wallet, strewn about with old hotel keys and dead credit cards.

But I couldn't find it.

I panicked.

I checked my boxes and bags, my drawers and pockets.

It didn't make any sense.

It couldn't be gone.

I used to be adept at controlling my frustration but my mind has shown, my reactions are fiercer, the cut of emotions has become unpredictable.

I dumped my wallet onto the chair in front of me and sobbed as I sifted through the useless detritus hiding my relic.

My proof that I mattered to someone.

Evidence that I'm worthy of being safe.

I bit a hole in the tip of my tongue as the concept of having lost it threatened my sanity.

I could find the numbers again but they wouldn't have come from her.

Under a pile of receipts I saw your name.

Sarah with an H.

You only know how important the H is if you've known a Sarah with an H.

My sister's name is Sarah.

I picked up the decrepit prescription, folds so imbedded the paper had started separating.

I thought about the Patron Saint of Unrequited Agony and impeccable cursive and for a moment I could breathe again.

I peered between the folds, and there was my exit strategy.

The steno paper and the print out, tucked between the letters of your name.

The world collapsed in on itself and for a brief blinding beautiful moment, everything made sense.

Every step I'd taken to get here.

Every step laid out before me.

Every sacrifice every complacent concession every unliveable memory of every unearned abuse.

You wrapped your name around my salvation and gave it meaning.

♤

Tomorrow I will visit Bridges.

It took two years to occupy a space I didn't feel worthy of;

Victim of Domestic Abuse.

I'll tell them it took me so long because I tried, I tried to rebuild on my own.

I tried so hard.

And they'll say they know I did.

They'll tell me it wasn't my fault.

I won't believe them.

But I believe you.

♤

Nihil Perditi.