Objectively Lacking

I figured, on some level, that he was pining for me.

Maybe pining is a strong word, but I assumed, surely, there must have been a tiny it of a spark remaining in his heart. He had kept the postcard, after all. After five years.

Just to be clear, because I feel like the details are important, this was not a postcard I wrote to him. I don’t really do postcards. Even when handwritten correspondence had a more significant role in a person’s life it was rare that I went to the trouble. Letters and cards in general were pretty painful, as a lefty, no matter how much I squirmed and contorted the side of my hand would inevitably land directly in the fresh ink, smudging it terribly. Inevitably it looked like I had spilled something on it, so I always felt self conscious when handing over a hand-written page to someone. When you combined that with my inexplicably abominable handwriting, I ended up with written documents that were ugly at best, completely illegible at worst. I'd turn in my homework and sort of wince in apology as I dropped it into that metal bin on the teacher's desk.

I was an early adopter of word processing programs. A disciple of Clippy. A Corel WordPerfect-ionist, if you will.

This was a postcard he had written to me. Apparently he had gone as far as addressing it, and putting a stamp on it. He had written it from Belgrade, which is where he grew up. I wish I could place the writing of the postcard on a timeline of the periods we went through. It came into being in 2015, which would have been about two years after we met. Was he divorced by then? I can't remember. We never did close the gap, but there were definitely moments where we moved in similar directions, on similar planes. We've both been on the NJ Turnpike this whole time, but never at the same patriotically named rest stop. Frankly, if this metaphor is truly perfect for my relationship history, I've been wandering around the James Fenimore Cooper rest area for about 16 years.

So he wrote it, but why didn’t he send it? Was he afraid to seem vulnerable? Did he articulate his feelings and have second thoughts about sharing them? Did he, in an emotional moment while walking on the river that I'm sure runs through Belgrade, feel the spirit move him to pluck a postcard from a stand in a tiny stall for tourist gifts and bare his soul, using a pen loudly printed with a picture of Belgrade Fortress? Did he find a bench somewhere, pull out a book to write on, and carefully consider every word as he articulated what he had been meaning to say to me?

The postcard had a picture of a bridge on it. A nice enough bridge, I guess. I can appreciate a good bridge. I learned the other day that the bridges I thought were suspension bridges are for the most part actually "cable-stayed" bridges. Like the Golden Gate Bridge. We've been lied to this whole time.

Bridges are actually one of my favorite shitty TV editing tropes- when the action is moving from Manhattan to the outer boroughs, they splice in quick pic of a bridge to emphasize how very far away Brooklyn is, emotionally, and depending on the show, socioeconomically. It's rarely a real bridge that exists in New York.  I've biked on them all, which makes me intimately familiar with them and I can spot a foreign bridge. But it doesn't matter. The gist is gotten.

Oh so the postcard- on the flip side, he had written the following:

Belgrade was so much fun. This trip was awesome. Like this bridge at [sic] the front of the postcard. Well, Almost. Hugs.

It’s amazing how the structures (the bridges?) you build in your head can topple instantaneously. 

Why did he save it?  Because he’s a guy who doesn’t throw things away. I’m so deeply someone who tosses things that I can’t make a great case for keeping that I forget that many don’t function that way. If I were to keep a postcard I had written five years earlier and never sent, it would be because there was a Reason, some attachment to either the piece of paper or the words on it. When he did give it to me, he seemed excited to hand it over, like it had some value, but I guess sometimes a postcard is just a postcard.

My whole life, in addition to feeling bogged down by People and Emotions, I've been perpetually bogged down by Things. A long time ago I just decided that I was going to throw away birthday cards from anyone I assumed I would get another one from at some point in the future. I have every intention of keeping the one that I'm relatively certain is the last one you give me (due to your imminent demise or mine.) You'll find my dead body in my fabulous apartment clutching that last card, heart thoroughly warmed prior to it stopping. But for now, I'll give it a good read and then wait until you leave to put it in the garbage, or in the recycling, depending on how I'm feeling that day about whether cards with glitter on them are recyclable, which lez be honest is always a game time decision.

It’s not exactly the same thing but I will on occasion keep little tokens of experiences I’ve had with the guys I date. I’ll save a ticket stub, or a receipt from an early-on date, something small, on the off chance that we fall madly in love and I need something to talk about during our engagement party. Inevitably the shiny illusion of compatibility fades shortly after, and I unceremoniously dump the deli number, or the post-it note note straight into the trash without a ton of feeling. When they’re just objects, they mean so little to me. Marie Kondo stole all of her tricks from me, except for the spiritual stuff, which I feel is superfluous but that is neither here nor there. I hold on to these little reminders because I know of their potential, but when that potential is unfulfilled I have no problem tossing them.

The harder things are the items that do fulfill that potential, or were designed to be deeply important from the get go. There are very few of these for me. A book I made of all of the emails I exchanged with someone I had a really lovely but confusing year with. A keychain that was the perfect weight, a metal design that someone brought back for me from California.

For a while after I got it, I would wrap my hand around the keychain in my pocket whenever I was feeling unsteady. I hardly think it was magic but the little surge of energy from knowing someone had specifically thought of me, missed me even, while he was gone was enough to take the edge off of an anxious moment. When our paths split and I walked away from him, I made myself throw it away. I have moments when I regret getting rid of it. But I guess we didn’t end up together it's one less thing to include when I'm getting my next moving company estimate. And the only things more NYC than moving a ton is being spat on by strangers (RIP) and… bagels?