2

I guess it was predictable that it would get bad again. For weeks now, every little thing summons that sick, trembling feeling in my stomach.

Sometimes it's the yellow jeeps. One will drive right by, blatant, and midsentence I'll forget what I was saying, or thinking, or where I was going. Sometimes they park along the route I walk, mute reminders of you. Other times they'll pass at the fringes of my vision, momentary ghosts reflected in shopfront windows, or rearview mirrors -- gone by the time I've swivelled to see. I've lost count of the times I've caught myself staring vacantly out of coffeeshop windows at a pair of receding taillights, or standing on the sidewalk, blankly regarding some piss-yellow Wrangler wedged up against a curb.

Sometimes it's not a jeep; it's a slender man with an unruly chestnut thatch and a thin T-shirt. Invariably he's alone, off in the middle distance. One afternoon he was sitting in the eucalyptus grove by the science building, poking at leaves with a stick; a couple of times he was crossing the street, an intersection away, his back turned. He's always just far enough away, just indistinct enough for the resemblance to be momentarily, heartbreakingly plausible.

Sometimes it's an old scrap of paper that surfaces unexpectedly -- your jotted-down pager number, a thank-you note in your cramped handwriting. Sometimes it's a storefront or an old apartment building or an entire neighborhood (hell, an entire city) wound up in old memories of you. A particular bench in the botanical garden; a particular gas pump you once defaced (adorned?) with anti-oil propaganda, now restored to sleek, corporate anonymity. Insects and omelettes and external-frame backpacks... or maybe just a certain vague aesthetic, a sort of defiantly contrarian dilapidation, that makes me think, "You would have loved this." You're lurking in all of these things, and the million and one little reminders of you never seem to soften, never wear down into something comforting. They still leap out and sock me in the stomach, a million and one sickening opportunities to realize all over again the loss, and the horror, and the fact that you're gone.

Worst of all, the awful feeling's always, always there at night, when I can't sleep. Sometimes there's just no staving off those ghastly, half-conscious hours spent cycling through a litany of regrets and remembrances, the inane repetitions that I'm sorry, over and over, however much I know I have nothing to be sorry for. This isn't how I want it to be; I know it's not what you'd have wanted... but somehow, knowing that never seems to fix it. I miss you. I keep waiting for this to get better. Sometimes it is, a little, but not lately. Not today.