Ellie

I have been struggling for the last few months. My health has been poor, it has been difficult to keep on top of things, I have just felt generally worn down and burnt out. But I have been managing. I have been trying to let myself rest more. Getting things off my plate. I have gotten ADHD meds. Most of all what has helped me get through is my partner, Ellie Cosgrove. We had only been together one year at the end of April but it was such a wonderful year. Being with her was healing in ways I cannot describe. I felt able to be fully myself with her. I was able to peel away masks I didn’t know I had been wearing all my life. I was learning to be myself through her. I was learning to love myself through loving her. I wanted to build my life around her.

She died on Wednesday night. The last few days have been the worst of my entire life. I have been looked after. Friends and family have been reaching out constantly. My mother and sister made sure that my fridge is more full than it has ever been and I had so much company over the last few days that it would have left me exhausted even in good circumstances. It hard to believe that it has only been a few days. It feels like so much longer. Like it has been weeks since this awful, raw thing crawled inside my chest and died. Weighing me down, wearing me out even more. So many of my everyday thoughts loop back to her and now everywhere in my mind there is just a horrible, grey, consuming, painful dead end. I’m thinking about This Is How You Lose the Time War again. About love infecting you and changing you and making the other person part of you. And in that last year that happened so much and so much more than I could have imagined. And now that part of me has been ripped away.

I keep coming back to this piece that she loved. I’m trying to internalise it. To remember to keep going. To remember that she loved me.

Okay. Come on, then. I love you, get up, we are going to keep going. Repeat this to yourself in a mirror or in a whisper or in the shower or in a shout. I love you, get up, keep going.

I am tired too. It’s okay. We will sleep in the car ride over. We will sleep on each other’s shoulders. We will sleep upside down and in the laps of new friends and on the bellies of our lovers and in the hands of better tomorrows. We will sleep and we will wake up rested and we will wake up happy and we will wake up home again.

I love you, get up. It’s time to write “maybe next time” on our gravesite. It’s time to write: it could not kill me, I would not die. It’s time to write a love letter to the sun and our one-act play and the history of our keychains. It is time to write a future where despite everything, we are finally warm and safe.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Get up. Keep going. We are going to be okay.

Rowan Perez

I would also appreciate any comments on this or any other post on this site, even just because most of the existing comments are from her and I would like to be able to review the Comentario dashboard without seeing her words at the top of it and be reduced to a sobbing mess again.