To Meg, From Wes

Every bench in Central Park has a story, all beginning with a dedication, this one's :

"To Meg – From Wes 

She worked, laughed, loved, cried and danced in this city

We fell in love on this island

She owned my soul from the beginning 

Before we even met."

I’ll bury us here.

My birthday is in 12 days. By now any other year we’d be sending out invitations you first learned to make on photoshop in film school.

I remembered you in therapy. Doc and I were reviewing the play by play of the fallout and there you were. The summer of 2021. We’d gone to a midtown bar with $16 cocktails and then to the Krispy Kreme for the first time since the pandemic. You were in a white crop top, crossing 47th Street celebrating a bite– your arms spread in bliss, eyes closed, head back and me, reveling in your presence and having risen from the dirge of 2020. 

On my way to this bench I passed the wine bar we went to the night that catalyst a life-long reckoning with my addictive proclivities. This was around the same time Doc introduced a stimulant and an SSRI, that, set against each other, would induce and exacerbate what problems I’d gone to him for help with in the first place. 

The day it happened, when I said what I did to you, I’d been up for 3 or 4 days straight. I felt on fire–singing and popping and quiet and molten and perfect. A painful and impossible miracle. 

I trust you have your reasons. I’m clear visioned enough to recognize the patterns, albeit handicapped enough to keep from understanding them fully. If grace could visit me I hope she’d speak directly. Tell me I was in love with you and that I was perhaps incapable of the kind of care that could keep those feelings from becoming… sharp. 

I miss you. 

I fell in love with you on this island and would give you a bench here if it would mean anything to you. Maybe I’ll give this one to myself. Near the oak bridge above a toxic lake and an etching that holds a story so many would think it’s theirs. That is. That isn’t. And so I’ll bury us here. Bury our love, our short-hand, our birthdays and the person I had my first legal drink with. 

In the lake- to be eaten alive I’ll toss my malice. The things I could say to hurt you as much as it did to lose you. The venom we sensitive few can generate ad infinitum when spurned. Tears turned poison in our throats. 

I’m sorry. 

I suppose it’s my fault for giving you ownership from the beginning. My fault, for ever giving you the deed.