In which I experience the culmination of this pilgrimage to my homeland, say goodbye to loved ones, and try to sort it all out…

[Emo Warning! Might be too personal and vulnerable for some readers. For others, fire up some sappy, sad music on your iPod and read on.]

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

I thought they’d be my in-laws some day. Grandparents to our children.

Today is probably the last time I’ll ever see them.

These two have become family to me, as I have to them, over the past seven years.

Kat’s mother and father have helped me sort through and load my share of the ashes of my relationship with their daughter. Among them are my mother’s artwork, the electronic R2-D2 which Kat bought me for Christmas in 2003, and mountains of other everyday objects that would no longer coexist under the same roof with hers. Each item I touch floods me with memories and emotions. I haven’t laid eyes on some of these objects since we packed them three years ago, when we still intended to reclaim them only five months later.

I look around Kat’s room, filled with objects from her life before we knew each other. Memorabilia from high school and early college, artifacts of the person who existed before I knew her. I never did feel like I fully knew her. She always kept me at arm’s length. All of these old photos and knick knacks that once aroused my curiosity are now only symbols of the barrier between us. I’ll never get to know more about them – about her.

I intentionally distract myself from obsessive thoughts, all of which are something to the effect of, “This is the last time I’ll be in this room,” and “This is the last time I see this photo,” and so on.

The U-Haul is full, and we three stand in the living room, making small talk, pretending that this is just another visit, only Kat happens to be absent, as if she’s just in the shower or has stepped outside to smoke, and may return at any moment.

They ask if I’m hungry, and I admit that I am. They bring me to Mo’s, a pizza place on the Westbank to which they’ve frequently taken us over the years. We eat muffalettas and talk about alternative fuels. I ask about their son, Kat’s brother. You would never know, by our conversation, that our relationship would not outlast the day.

We return to their house. They invite me to have a seat and something to drink. I crack open a Barq’s, and we watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on their new HD TV.

Kat’s mother has to leave for Church. I need to leave, because I’m going to a Mother’s Day dinner with my own family tonight. The words we say are the same as always. “Thanks for lunch, and for helping me load stuff.” ”Have a safe trip.” “We’ll be seein’ ya.” “Yeah, see you later.” We all three choke back tears. We’ve spent our last day together. All I can think about is our trip to Disney World four and a half years ago. I found a photo of Kat, her dad, and me riding The Tower of Terror alone, the three of us screaming joyfully in the corner of an empty “elevator” car.

We walk out the back door. They watch me drive the U-Haul out of their driveway. As soon as I close the car door, tears stream down my face. I feel like I’ve lopped off a limb. I feel like I’m deliberately turning my back on my own relatives, right before their eyes.

I wonder if I should’ve asked her to marry me. She and I were it. We were in each other’s families. We lived most of our adult lives together. Even in my darkest mood, I found her irresistible. No aspect of my life, even from before I met her, has gone untouched by her. This current situation feels like the willful disposal of a family, loved ones who’ve done nothing to deserve the loss. How does one dispose of that sort of human, loving attachment, solely because of the logistical decision to break up? How can you shrug off what has become such a vital and emotional part of your life, because of a simple decision like that? How can you even break up at all when things are that far along and intertwined? It seems like it would’ve been easier and less painful to work the damn thing out.

It makes me regret and rethink everything.

But no matter what goes through my mind, it’s all moot. It’s over. I have to detach the emotional connotations, and file this family, this life, away with other incidental memories and past experiences that are no longer relevant. But how can you make such things irrelevant? How do you undo it? How can I look at her parents, who have accepted me as fully as their own offspring, and just drive away?

The irony is not lost that they are more real, immediate and communicative with me in a normal, everyday way than their daughter is now, the woman whom I gave all of myself. She and I are effectively strangers now, but her parents feel like they may as well be my own parents. Their house may as well be the house in which I grew up. In their house, I feel as if nothing has changed, as if things were back to normal.

I don’t know how this works.

Looking toward the future,
We were begging for the past.
Well, we know we had the good things,
But those never seem to last.

“Missed the Boat,” Modest Mouse

It’s too late to do anything about it. She has moved on. I am under the impression that she had emotionally moved on years ago, actually. It doesn’t matter how vigorously I crusaded for the success of a relationship, if my partner simply isn’t in love with me.

All I can do is mourn the living.

I drive to Metairie and have dinner with my father’s side of the family to celebrate Mother’s Day. My own mother died four years ago. I visited her grave two days ago, on my way out of Macon, Mississippi.

It all just feels like marking time. A lifetime and all of the events and relationships contained therein ultimately amount to precisely nothing, don’t they?

Our ideas held no water,
But we used them like a dam.

You build towards something that does not exist. It’s not a risk; it is, in point of fact, a certainty that all of it ends or is invalidated. I invested myself mostly into two people, and now they’re both gone. One of them taken by illness, the other left by choice.

If love – and the people you love – are all that really matters, if love is all you need, then why is it so impotent and disposable?

We made ourselves a pillow,
We just used it as a crutch.

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

This morning, my phone rang just a few minutes before my alarm was set to go off. It was Kat’s father. He was letting me know that he was going through the stuff at their house again, and he found my old airbrush and air compressor (which I received during my model-making days in high school and have still never used). He wanted to catch me before I was on the road already, and offered to bring it to me, if I wanted it.

Part of me wanted to say, “Yes, please, I want to see you all again, I want to continue to know you, even if it’s just for another few minutes,” or even to say, “Yes, and while you’re at it, bring the heirloom engagement ring that Kat told me she’d wear if and when we got engaged, because I want to undo this course of action altogether.” It didn’t help that I had been dreaming about her when the phone woke me up. My gut reaction was to plead for the chance to make it all right, to change the course of past events.

But I said I’d chalk it up as a loss, that they could keep the airbrush or give it away. I had to get on the road early, and I would have no use for the thing anyway.

I spent today’s eleven-hour drive to St. Louis actively thinking about anything and everything that was not already behind me. I tried to distract myself with the present and future, with limited success.

When we finally had it figured out,
That we had truly missed the boat.