I Will Keep Your Middle Name: A Friend Breakup Grief Diary

By Turi Sioson

By Mariel Wiley

When I say I pressed myself to stop loving you, I mean I have not been able to stop loving you.

When I won’t say your name in fewer syllables, I refuse to reduce you to the good you did for me.

Someone has to drive me out of this orbit. Someone has to take the pictures. It's fine if you don't want to look anymore. I have my ways.

You won’t have to recognize your own want — I’ll do it for you, love. (Can I still call you that if the tinny of your voice now makes me furious?)

I deleted your name from my poems, one scoop of letters and the spasm of my pinky at the keyboard. I don’t want you anywhere near my labor. You didn’t talk like you wanted my fiction.

I kept your Christmas gift and had to buy you a new one when we started speaking again. I let you leave most of it unsaid, when you apologized, half-heartedly, for your towering disengagement.

I don’t regret keeping secrets from you.

At night, I’d search for poems that could describe us. I didn’t feel old enough to be our scribe. You didn’t feel young enough to be slapping my hand away when I reached it out.

A red stain at the collarbone of my favorite sleeping shirt. I woke with your hot breath against my neck, wishing it was someone else’s. I won’t say I was afraid of your temper but certainly it was restrictive — a doghouse I learned to teethe with.

There is something in the water supply. There is something moving in the water. Something is crawling out of the tap. I was thinking, Maybe she’ll find this one funny.

In the interest of no longer caring for you, I’ve gone a long time without telling people I’m married to you. I announced divorce to a witness, just for good measure. But I won’t unpin the engagement photo, where we’ll stand forever in hot grey weather, hoping not to move.

That trip was the start of our undoing. I visit it often. Bittered, the way you were for an unreasonable number of hours. A child who wouldn’t respond to the sound of her own name. I let you sleep in the bed because I was afraid of bed bugs, and I wanted to cry on the living room couch. I was the last to fall asleep and you were the last to wake, angry even after we let you sleep through our dressing and half-breakfast.

I am not sorry for being responsible about hunger. I will not apologize for keeping the unpleasantness at bay — at least from two of us — in the grocery store where you exhausted energy by scolding us.

You never knew how often I walk around scared. Did you have to fill in this many blanks about me?

I could wring your hands for the things you didn’t say. I would follow you at the heels in hopes that your mood might turn.

In the car and at work, you challenged my sexuality. I’ve added you to the list of people I love who don’t believe me. You’re at the top because of the surprise factor.

I don’t always have to be right. But about you, I was.

The first week we were friends I had the premonition that there’d be a flash of resentment that came as quick as we decided to love each other.

I’m tired of love grown out of anger, even if it was just play.

Once, you said, Don’t tell me what to do in front of a pair of bright-eyed customers, and I didn’t have a chance to glance your face before you turned toward the table I’d indicated. I turned suddenly small. It wasn’t until the end of the shift that you clarified it’d been a lark — a late continuation of the show we’d put on earlier for unsuspecting guests. I didn’t know how to take the realization that I fully believed you’d simply become fed up with me.

Sometimes I imagine we grew up together as children. That I was there when you took an apple from the tree, before you were allergic. I can’t be sure you’d have loved me then. I can’t be sure you love me now.

You wanted me to hate the world. I have always been a Romantic.

We used to bruise our ribs laughing. Made all the managers angry that we were having fun. You made the girls feel bad for being girls. I never wanted to be part of a clique. The managers insist that it was my fix, too. Mean girl by association. I resent that you startled respect right out of me. I loved you so much.

I haven’t laughed so hard in the time without you. Sometimes I get close to it and catch myself missing.

My identity is not yours to play with. I don’t care how much you believe you know me.

What if I’m not ready to let go of the idea that we were meant to be tied to one another. What if I’m having trouble saying your middle name.

When you were angry, any one of my faults was fair game. I know I’m fortunate to have gotten one good year with you. Was it really too much to plead for two?

I’ve put you on the list of people I love who never listen to me. You’re at the bottom so I don’t have to confront it.

I have to hide you from view to get through the day without regret. I will keep the pictures up. I will not remove your name from the dedication.

What are you like in the first week of true fall, in a job I know nothing about? How long until you have replaced me?

I keep myself up at night because it’s what you taught me to do. I keep myself up at night knowing I will never replace you.

I worked in accounting every summer of my teenhood but still I do not know how to reconcile your laugh with your silence. You’ve loved all my favorite things. I tell stories about you like you’re about to round the corner. I tell stories about you like you’re giggling beside me with the memory.

I have decided to still love you. I have decided to keep remembering you. There is no one to tell me that this is the right thing to do.

I’ve had a realization about the way your name falls together and does so again, backwards. I’ve had an epiphany about what you were always supposed to be to me.

You are the only one who will understand this. ♦