I need to believe you are good, in case this never gets better. In case there is never a resolution, in case all that is left here is silence, the kind that is thick, palpable. In case it is just ghosts.
In case it someday feels like that town in Pennsylvania, the one with the fire underneath that has been sitting on a burning mine labyrinth for 56 years, what if you are like that? What if you never actually leave? I have washed the sheets, but I am still finding your hair on pillowcases, so I need to believe you are good, because if I do not, it will mean there is something terrible still permeating all the parts of my life, especially the insignificant ones. Nobody thinks about pillowcases until someone is haunting them.
The very small things, the bedroom window that won’t stay open on its own, the mason jar of whiskey, the dried fruit in the cabinet, it is those things that travel through me every day. Hundreds of tiny pieces of my world, all of them pulling on my ribcage, all of them touched by you. The garbage left in my car by you, the old coffee cups on which the baristas misspelled your name, I am still finding them. I need to believe you are good because you are everywhere, and if you are not good, it means I am not good, either. If you are not good, it means no part of this was real, and I have lived the last year in a mirage. If you are not good, it means I am a grown woman who Fell For It, and every story trope tells us only stupid people Fall For It, and I will be humiliated.
If you are not good, it means I fed my heart to hyenas, it means I was desperate to be loved by you, it means all of my accomplishments and all of my secular brilliance could not amount to a woman who knows when she is being lied to. If you are not good, then possibly no one is good, then possibly no one has ever loved me or will love me, possibly not one part of it was ever solid or true. But I was here, too. In this room with you. I was here each time. If you are not good, it means I let a monster unbutton my dresses, and I do not let monsters undress me.
You can’t be a monster, I have fallen asleep in your arms. I was there, and people are never only one thing at a time. I need to believe you are good so that I can know the goodness you found in me was not just a story you were telling to trick me out of my blouse.
I need to believe you are good, so that I can believe I did not lose all this time and space. This is not a sacrifice. This is not for you. This is not romanticism. This is survival in dystopia.
I am no carnival rube. I am no fool. I am no stranded, desperate Rapunzel in need of instruction on how to climb down my own braids, I am not Penelope, I am not waiting, you are gone and I must keep moving. But if I cannot believe you are good, I must believe I am fool enough to deserve every terrible thing you have ever done to me.
I need to believe you are good so that I am allowed to have loved you. So that I am allowed to exit with dignity, with purpose. So that I can believe the next person I take long walks with in the snow in the middle of the night, the next person I kiss to the hum of street lights, the next person whose hands I welcome onto my skin, is good. So that I can be brave. So that I can save myself from cynicism in a culture of gallows humor, I need to believe you are good so that I can believe I am worthy of kindness. That every time you were kind to me it was because I was someone who inspired it, that it was what you wanted for me.
I need to believe you are good because otherwise I am crazy.
I need to believe you are good so that I do not have to be ashamed of missing you. So that I do not have to think you woke up one day and suddenly did not love me anymore. So that I do not have to wonder if this was all easy for you. So that I stop telling myself I am unloveable. I need to believe you are good so that I can live with myself ever having wanted you. So that I can live with myself wanting more things, other people, after you. So that I can wake up tomorrow and know that this is all over, and that I did everything as best as I could, so that I can believe you did everything as best as you could. That you did all you knew how to do.
And that circumstance is sometimes like volcanoes and sometimes our hearts are Pompeii. That there is a memory of me preserved perfectly in the wreckage of this eruption, and it is of us laughing with our foreheads pressed against each other’s, that it exists for you, too, and I don’t care if this is true, I need to believe it.
That this was not an act of cruelty. It was just Pompeii.