I have visited with friends, here and there: coffee. People love to have coffee and I am one of them. Over coffee, you talk, you observe the rest of the world as it is coming and going and you kibitz. It’s good: it helps. But nothing changes.
My transition, such that it is, has been awkward. But nothing has changed.
Not yet.
I am not adjusting the way I thought, or hoped I might. It’s difficult for me to be around people. One of my best friends, his mother passed around the time I was still taking care of Ebony. I was gutted. I guess everyone knew it was coming for his Mom, inevitable: but no less upsetting. She was great and she was great to Ebony. There was a memorial, up here in Newport, recently, around the time I returned. Of course I attended; but I was so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people I knew – people who knew my story but had not interacted with me until that day – and ever since I’ve been shying away from social contact. I have been trying, but…
It’s difficult. I can’t explain it. One-one-one is easy, or easier; among people, two or three or more… not so much.
Every day, every waking moment is about Ebony. That is all I think about. I am surrounded by her. My mother worries that I making my life -- this house -- into an Ebony shrine: her presence is overpowering: her absence is shattering.
With people, one-on-one, I find I am “pretty okay.” But mostly I am wishing to return to my bedroom, to my Queen-sized bed, to a collection of pillows I have assembled that looks like – in my head -- a Martha Stewart photo-spread covering an Ian Schrager hotel bedroom. There are too many pillows. Every day in the morning and every day at night, I shower them with her perfume and clutch one of the pillows when I am trying to sleep… desperately trying to recall holding her, back when things were good.
Last week, the son of one of our neighbors, my mother’s contemporaries, stopped me and asked how I was doing. He knew about what was going on, but I hadn’t seen him since Thanksgiving. I had to run down the whole thing and that kinda set me off. It’s just hard being around people at all. Harder still to relive everything – all the bad things and the reasons why.
I spend a lot of time trying to think about the good things – and there are SO many – but something as simple as that -- explaining the eight months of Ebony’s decline thanks to a fucking malignant brain tumor – I find it overwhelming and retreat to my ersatz Newport boudoir, a place where Ebony and I spent much time. I am now long out of our apartment in Queens, but we spent a lot of time in Newport and I cannot escape the time spent here.
So, yeah. It’s just not that easy. One-on-one, okay; but around people is awkward and weird and I always want to leave. I simply don’t want to constantly relive the last eight months, which were horrifying. It’s not you: it’s me. Truly.
I say this because I am still trying to figure out, I don’t know, “things.” Where I’m at; where I’m going; what I’m going to do. I have no idea.
I am vexed with myself, troubled and confused. I think sometimes, “Hey, I’m feeling better!” And then later – days, hours, minutes, sometimes moments later – I am a mess.
It’s not that I don’t want to be among my friends or be positive and hang out and bitch about whatever… it’s just that anything can affect me.
When Ebony was first diagnosed with brain cancer, we were encouraged to seek out “grief counselors.” At Ebony’s insistence, I did meet with a… whatever. I don’t know. Psychiatrist. Counselor. Bearded dude much younger than I am. I took to it as if I was Tony Soprano. I was against it at first but I went for Ebony, and later… later, it was okay. But it didn’t change what was happening to Ebony and that didn’t change how I thought. When things got bad, I stopped going. I simply could not afford it but mostly wanted to be with Ebony. Because what the fuck?
Ebony was a huge part of me. Ebony got inside my head, long before we even slept together: more than anyone ever did and more than I can explain right now. We were not merely lovers -- engaged, betrothed -- we were best friends. BEST FRIENDS. I’ve never had the kind of intimacy I had with Ebony in any other relationship. I told her all my secrets and she told me hers. Can you say that about your love? Losing her was not just losing a partner: I lost everything.
Now, here I am, three months later, and nothing feels right. I feel like I am going through motions. I oblige everyone who reaches out to me as much as I can, but sometimes I can’t return a text or a DM or voice mail for days. I also don’t want to be a bad friend, so it is especially difficult to meet people. I don’t have much to say about the world in general – and who cares? – because all I have is this awful, aching pain. “Oh, hey, how’s it going?” – “Well, I am miserable…”
Ebony’s presence in my life is overwhelming: her absence is shattering.
I think a lot of people were worried -- maybe rightly so, maybe not – that I might kill myself. After Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain – whose food I am proud to say I have consumed back in my Joe Allen days when he was at Les Halles and I was at Joe -- I understand the flood of messages. Let me say this clearly: I am not going to kill myself. I AM NOT GOING TO KILL MYSELF. I might delight in the idea after a couple of glasses of wine, but I have ZERO intent of ever doing such a thing. Not after what I have been through with Ebony. ZERO. Okay? She would not approve and I need to live. For her. But living right now… not so easy.
This is where I’m at and I don’t mean it to be alienating but at the same time, I crave and need and am comforted by my solitude. Sometimes, I just HAVE to be alone. I am an only child. Ebony and I were both only children raised by single-parent mothers. We knew each other before we ever met. Some nights, we would sit at opposite ends of the couch and not speak for – I don’t know -- hours: because we needed that time. That was our thing that we each understood. And that’s nothing against anyone. So if you don’t hear from me for a while… that’s why.
I find myself answering people, in their texts and DMs, that, when I am asked how I’m doing, I say, “it depends on what day it is.”
Yeah, I know, that my world is coming down. And the world, and the world, yeah: the world drags me down.