The Girl Across the Sea

It is really a funny thing, the way this life thing goes, and even more so, the way it ends. I am not even sure as to how long it has been since her demise, because from that point forward, my seconds turned to minutes, minutes to hours, hours to days, days to weeks, weeks to months, months to years, years to decades, decades to centuries, centures into millenia. Everyone around me has wept with me, they've made me meals, they've sat and listened to me drone on and on about the million little things about her that I love(d). Sometimes they'd come over and begin to make a pot of coffee. The hiss and the drip of the coffee pot even reminds me of her. Those things press against my chest more than anything else, to be honest with you. When I hear my visitors dropping two teaspoons of sugar into the coffee mug, it reminds me of the first time she and I sat across from each other, and I watched her delicate, pale hands prepare coffee the way she loved it: one cream, two sugars. It reminds me of watching her hands encase the mug and bring it up to her lips, those red lips that rarely were visited by lipstick but were capable of telling stories that enraptued their listeners. It was all these little things that rooted themselves deeply into me, moving their way past my ribcage and my heart, and ending up wherever it is the soul resides in the body. Not to spend too much time on the lips, but the way they would look as I told a funny story, or the sound that protruded as I told a joke. Her eyes were indecisive about their color, but I loved them nonetheless. She enjoyed looking me square in the eye when we spoke; I would sometimes have to to dart my gaze because I could not take their intensity. I was no match for her.
Those same people who come and drip the coffee also coming dripping words that encourage me that life goes on, that time heals, and that eventually, that feeling of the lost breath of drowning will be a million miles away, like someone across the sea. Life goes on, yes. Cars still careen down roads, and planes take up their apportioned spot of blue skies; people still walk around grocery stores filling their carts with food and milk, they scour the morning paper for sports scores and diatribes about the state of the economy. Birds continue to build nest, dogs continue to bark at strangers, students continue to learn, the elderly continue to die, and babies keep being born. Even I keep waking up, I shower, brush my teeth, and get along in my day. I talk to people, I write in notebooks, I watch television, I eat meals, and all the while, I dread the night because whatever momentary moments of freedom from the oppression of the yearning for her to be around, the night removes them. Life goes on, yes, but I am just making my way through it. I am just kind of limping along trying to find the next moment of respite, the next moment where I won't break down in the shower or while driving, the next moment where a story will actually cause me happiness before I remember that I cannot share it with her.
It feels like she is a girl across the sea, a foreign woman who can't speak my language and I can't speak hers. It feels the way that it feels to realize that right now, there are people in Japan or in London who are doing what I'm doing, just living their lives, writing things down, falling in love, smoking cigarettes and appreciating beautiful music, yet I will never meet them. There is a tragedy in this reality. We may be hindered by language, funds, or just sheer distance; but the aims are the same. She is like a girl across the sea, and I want nothing more to write a letter and place it in a bottle and throw it in the Pacific and hope that she gets it. Or I would want to construct a bridge from the Atlantic Coast to where she was at. Starting in the shallow end during summer, I would build it upwards and curve back down towards where she was at. But of course, there are bills to pay, jobs to do, degrees to finish, other people to love and care about. That moment of sickness hits me at this realization, and it does so every morning when I open my eyes and realize she is not here, but across the great Sea, somewhere out there where cartographers have not been able to map and where explorers could only hope to dream of. I had a dream where I was following her through all these rooms, and she was always just two steps ahead of me. She would stop, turn around, and smile, and I would stop and smile back and reach out, but as I did this, she would begin to move yet again. I never caught her. I never will. If this is my destiny, hers is to be across the Sea. All I can do is keep moving, and hope my letter gets to her someday.