The abject comparisons. I can't take them anymore. Take with it the reciprocal altruism, if you would. I know what it means. I know that it's real and it's waiting for me and that's why I can't move.
Once upon a time in a rare and fleeting show of confidence I could bring Cole to a standstill with my contempt for his cataclysmic lack of demonstrative emotional skills.
He would cave, he would fall apart trying to make me talk to him when he crossed a verbal line. He was never sorry for his physical missteps but he watched his words. He hated my disparagement of myself. He hated when I shut him out, he would joke and chide and try to draw me out, almost as if he wanted me to forgive him on the spot or he'd die miserably.
Ironic. Both the emotional eruptions and his death even. It still reels me right out over a ledge.
I never gave him the silent treatment. I would just process whatever he said and just think about it. I go quiet. I learned a lifetime ago not to beat things to death verbally and now it's something I do every day. More comparisons in living with night and day, moon and sun, dark and now light. Jacob likes to put words on everything. He draws me back out agonizingly to talk even though sometimes we leave it. Cole would go insane leaving it. Jacob has more patience and more confidence in his relationship with me. Something he never had until Cole was gone. Cole was his shadow in love and his rival in life. It's as freeing for him as it is for me to be out from under that intense scrutiny.
Emerging as the winner in a close race is my one private, final question for Cole. One question I asked him constantly and never got an answer to, one bit of closure and peace of mind he took with him to the grave in a rare show of secrecy that leaves me devastated forever. Simply devastated.
He never once gave me an answer. Jacob, with his heart in my hands will run out of breath giving me answers, epic ones, silly ones. The moon will rise and our eyes will grow so heavy and he'll be slurring reasons as he falls into sleep but I know when he wakes up he'll have thought of more ways.
Life is day from night. Light years and lifetimes different from before. Beautiful. Loving, so loving and passionate and overwhelming compared to before and so why would I keep this particular question in my heart? Why did it become more important than maybe asking why he had to be so quietly cruel?
Maybe because he answered that one, with laughter and spite. Otherwise, whatever answers he knew, he kept to himself. Maybe because he didn't know why. Because I was there. Because I loved him enough for both of us, maybe he didn't understand how that worked. He always came back to me even when he hated me, when there were better girls, when he had more fun without me.
Somehow my love was enough to spread across many hearts. So one would remain in the dark and the other would grow toward the light, eventually becoming too tired to hang on anymore and dropping the other heart down down into the black spiral that wouldn't let go of him long enough to give him to me, or long enough to give me that answer. It was the only thing I ever wanted from him and it would have made all the difference in the world.
