Time is a thief and it’s stealing you away from me
Sometimes I imagine the long, curved winding roads up the mountain to dad’s house. The cold air that sunk right down into your bones, so clean that it made your lungs hurt. The smell of the pine and fur trees, how they towered over the road and were all you could see in any direction for miles and miles.
I remember once when we were kids, we sat in the back of dad’s 4runner, after he had cut the roof out and opened the entire backseat to the wind, as he drove up the mountain in the dark. He kept trying to scare us by turning his headlights on and off, as he would go around curves in the pitch black, laughing and taunting us. But there was a meteor shower and it looked and felt like the stars were raining down on top of us, both of us with our hair whipping around, the whole sky filled with shooting stars. We were laughing and screaming but we were not afraid. I felt so alive. I felt like nothing could scare us then.
That place I kept like a secret — my second home — lived and breathed inside of me. The horses across the field that rose at dawn, the river that ran back behind the house, the sound of our feet crunching through wet snow. Getting up in the dark to go to work with dad, how he’d give me sweet coffee in a thermos, and turn the heater in his single cab truck so high that it felt like suffocating.
How everything felt slower there, like time did not work in the same way, like everything was perpetually years behind everywhere else and standing still.
I loved it so much there that even thinking of it makes me want to cry. It was one of my favorite places and it felt like it belonged to me somehow.
Until the roads that we watched the stars from, the pine trees, the firs, the mountain we had grown up on — until it took your life, until it stole you away from me. Until it took everything. The place I loved so much would take the person I loved so much and become a memory that is too painful to revisit, a place lost unto time, a ghost living and breathing inside of me. The pines continue to grow like nothing ever happened. The snow and the horses, the river grass bending in the wind, the sun as it dips behind the mountain — lost to the world like you were lost to the world and I still can’t reconcile it.
After we took you off life support, me and your girlfriend stood near the river’s edge and she told me that she could see you in me, she told me that you had loved me the most. I cried and threw rocks into the river, smoked a cigarette, saw sunspots and shadows when I closed my eyes as the late sunlight flooded through the trees.
I couldn’t find my voice for months after you had gone, I didn’t even reply to her. But I loved you the most, too. I still do, I still do.
I miss you, and the trees, and the calm shore of the lake. I miss the places where time stopped moving. I miss the life I kept like a secret that still had you inside of it.
I miss you, most of all, more than anything.