well it always seems to me a day with you can feel like a month together, and still, in a month we can live a lifetime.
Why do the days seem so impossible to overcome?
Why can’t someone learn the answers to these questions and why can’t someone solve the mysteries of the day? Sometimes I wish that life would be easier. Why can’t the simple answers be the answers for some people like me?
Months make time disappear when you seem to disappear from my thoughts, from my sight... and then someone has to go and remind me of you, and all my thoughts of you come rushing back. I don’t know where you go while you’re gone, and I don’t know why I’m forced to remember you, and I don’t know what to do with all these questions that no one can answer for me.
No one seems to have the answers that I have been looking for. So should I stop looking?
How many times will I be forced to remember the past, my saying good-bye to you, my forgetting you? I wish you could know a fraction of the thoughts that have been in my head, since your death, since mine.
I keep wondering when my life will start, who will protect me from all my bad dreams. The dreams keep coming to me, just so you know. Not that you’d have any of the ideas that have gone through my head about the world, or the dreams about you, or about me. That’s something I’m just supposed to forget. Like magic.
I wish that getting an answer from you would be as easy as getting an answer from anyone you would usually argue with. I’ve wanted to tell you for so many minutes, so many months, so many years, that I still miss you. I’m sure that doesn’t sound like the truth when I try to tell you, but I mean it. My sister, when I got out of my latest car accident, brought me one of your paintings. I remember it having a blue background, not a red one, but maybe that was just my memory creeping up on me again.
I wish I knew how you felt. About me. I wish about things like that, at times. I wish — but I’ve had strange thoughts like that in my lifetime — that thoughts could be instantly different. I suppose I shouldn’t think about wishes that can’t just come true, like that, but this is the gist of dreams I still fruitlessly dream about. This is my life now, just so you know, Just so you can get a glimpse of what my life is like now.
I hope that somehow I managed to convey something about you and about me in all of this. I wish I could have given you more of that in life. Or in death. There are times, just so you know, when I wish things could be different for you, or for me, or even for us.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s just no sense in the world. I mean, is that all there is to it? Is someone just pulling one big joke on me, like pulling the wool over my eyes? When is everything supposed to just get better and have a happy ending?
Every once in a while I see a painting that you did and I think of you and I still feel sad. I wonder when the pain will go away, when I will eventually just forget you and that will be the end of it. Well, that hasn’t come yet. I’m still witing for that day. Someone tell me when it comes? Someone?
I had the whole image in my head: I was in the hospital recovering from after the coma and the only way for you to visit me there would be through the cars that I can see out my window. And you came to the door and got rid of my family that would have recognized you and would have said, Òhey, he’s alive. Somebody stop him!Ó But my whole family wasn’t around, not in my little dream that I pictured, and you came, and my doctors were mad and I was almost unconscious and you tried to talk to me. And I tried to make sense in my head out of what you were saying, and I kept asking you if you were alive. That was all I could come up with to say to you on such short notice. And you kept asking me ÒwhatÓ, and still wanted me to never give you the right answer, the answer to whatever you were asking. I wanted the answers I had for you to just come spilling out of my mouth.
I wish the answers wouldn’t come as easily as the truths do.
I think back to all of the good-byes we should have had, and I think about all of the hellos we also should have had. I still don’t have the answers, but I DO have my thoughts and I still miss you. And I think of you while I’m in that house that aches in pain, with good and evil, the house which holds all of my clothing now. With all of those demons that just won’t go away.
I wanted to tell you so much over the years. I wanted to let you know that, even if you never hear it or even if you never believe it, there has always been a part of me — and there will always be a part of me — however little you want to believe it — there will always be a part of me that will always love you. That seems like such a shallow thing to say. That seems like such a shallow thing to repeat. But I guess I said it. So there it is. I know you loved me, I know I never told you I loved you back. Maybe that was wrong for me to do. Maybe when you were alive I just didn’t know any better. Maybe I just wanted to always be right (that could have been it). Maybe I didn’t want to use those words because you’d think I wanted to marry you. But I didn’t want to tie myself down to someone who would die at an earlier age.
I just didn’t know how early.
I know you deserved so much more than me. Most people did, I was mean. That was how I felt. I hope you did — and you will — always understand that.
Sometimes the answers didn’t come to me, and sometimes I didn’t know what to tell you at the times when you needed it most. I wish I could fill in all of the gaps that were missing from my less-than-perfect education. I needed to learn. And so did you, I suppose. And maybe we can one day forgive each other, and maybe even teach each other a thing or two one day. I’ll still always be sorry to you, just so you know. I hope for now that this is enough of an apology. Forgive me.
I’d like to think that you were still alive, so I could say that maybe one day I’ll see you again and we can make this all works out somehow. I kept dreaming you were still alive after I almost died, but if you were around I’d say that we should reserve a date for it — for our time when we’re supposed to get together. I’m marking the date. You do the same. July tenth was our first date, but that date is too close to my death date. So maybe... well, August tenth sounds like a good date to me. Remember it. Remember the date, and thank you for nothing, and thank you for everything. I’ll see you soon.
U.S. Government Copyright
Chicago Poet Janet Kuypers
on all art and all writings on this site completed
before 6/6/04. All rights reserved. No material
may be reprinted without express permission.
