The Saddest Place I Know

I can't muster the will to be sad about you anymore, not in any real way. I reason that you're just a different person than you were: the one who was my friend would not have acted this way. But people change, you've changed.

Pain does that to people. And if you're getting along well enough without me now, then I can't blame you for doing what works. But I question if I would want to be the friend of someone who would write me off so easily, over so little, and I think, no. I think, that's not the person I loved.

So I've gotten past the sadness, for the most part. It doesn't really make me sad to think of you, the way it used to.

But sometimes, sometimes when something else has happened, I will get sad. I will get sad after an argument with somebody else. I will get sad when I have no one to call to talk about it, and no where to go.

And the sadness from that will bleed into all the other sadness in my life: the people that have died, the people that will. Sickness and age and disagreements that are no one's fault, but can never be resolved. The feeling of mortality, the feeling of loss. A profound mourning for everything, and nothing.

It'll all mix together and settle into my bones, and I'll want to go to the saddest place I know.

That's when I come here.

I drive across the river and down the road, and I turn up the hill and onto your street. I drive until I see the place you used to live; the place where we used to spend our time together.

I park my car, and I stare at it, and I sit.

Sometimes, you come here still. I'll see your car in the driveway. I'll see the light in the room we used to hang our in for hours. I'll think of how close I am to you, and I'm tempted to reach out for you: for the person who could understand my sadness. In that moment, I'll wonder if maybe you still are who you were. I'll wonder, and ill miss you.

Pain does that to people.

I don't know that I'll go inside again, see you again. But when things like they do now, when it settles in my bones, this is where I end up.

This is the saddest place I know.

On with it.