[Trigger warnings: loss, death, grief.]
It can often be useful to have a brain that literally works like a calendar.
And it can be very powerful and even wonderful to have such an innate connection to seasons, dates, recurrences, such a natural or instinctive sense for anniversaries and celebrations as I do.
But it’s a double-edged sword, a sword that cuts two ways and sometimes is very sharp and cuts painfully.
With the present slow and somewhat oscillating yet steady oncoming of Spring typical of Colorado, an almost natural or instinctive expectation, at the level of my heart and body, has been reawakened in me around my European queer ex-lover.
They stumbled into my life two years ago, in my first Coloradan spring — both of us unawares of what our encounter, which was originally merely professional, would eventually lead to. In their first (academic) visit they stayed here in Colorado only three months, from March to June, during the spring and into the beginnings of Coloradan summery weather.
Last year they were here for five and a half months. After having been mostly out of touch during the previous autumn & winter, they emailed me early in 2023 to confirm/remind me of their second (academic) visit to Colorado.
The first three months of 2023 were particularly eventful and mostly rough or intense for me, but by the time the last weekend of March came around, and I was planning to go to the Trans Night of Visibility celebration with some friends here, I knew my European queer academic friend was back, I knew they had just arrived a week or two prior, so I invited them to go to the Trans Night of Visibility party with me & my local friends.
I dreamt about my European queer ex-lover last night. And I dreamt about them while I was away on my trip last week, too.
These dreams are vivid and intense, they feel so real — both the dreams and my European queer ex-lover in them. In both recent dreams my European queer ex-lover is back. They are here again, we are standing together somewhere or having a meal together and we are talking, trying to resolve or at least clarify the conflict of our breakup from last summer but I don’t feel a sense of resolution: I feel abandoned. I feel angry and hurt and abandoned by them. That’s what has been coming up in these recent dreams about them — I guess that’s how I still feel deep down inside. In my two recent dreams I’m telling my European queer ex-lover: you abandoned me; first, you were pursuing me but only when/because you were lonely and had no one else and you were lost or bored; then you found someone else, something else, and lost interest in me and abandoned me without even giving me a chance to talk, to respond.
In some ways, I feel that the emotional response I’m having now is like the realization of someone really close & dear & beloved having died. On January 18th, 2024, I did my burial ritual of my European queer ex-lover, a few days after having felt the grief flow out of me, almost like a psychedelic spiritual experience while dancing. That burial ritual was the right thing for me to do: it felt good, appropriate, healing, liberating, powerful then and afterwards. I still believe, and feel, that it was the right, and timely, thing for me to do. What I’m feeling now, though, is what one feels when the reality of that burial, of that “death”, hits: my European queer ex-lover is not coming back (for me). Not this year, not ever.
So far, I’ve spent two springs in Colorado: both of those springs were marked by the arrival and presence in my life of my European queer ex-lover. So probably my body, and maybe my heart, has learnt to associate Colorado springtime with my European queer ex-lover. Therefore, with the arrival of this spring — my third spring here in Colorado — I guess my body & heart were somehow instinctively, or unconsciously, expecting the arrival, the renewed presence, of my European queer ex-lover. My head wasn’t — isn’t — expecting this, but my body & heart, I guess, were. And now the realization that this isn’t going to happen is hitting hard, coming through in my dreams, as the recurrence of the Trans Night of Visibility draws near, closer & closer this weekend…
Now I’m feeling it again, how much I miss them. And I’m missing them as one misses someone who has died: with the knowledge that that longing will never be satisfied.
The Little Prince and the Fox 