There's nothing bittersweet about sorrow

She was engaged to be married. The wedding date was uncertain at this point, it was too soon to nail it down, and the ring was still an idea in his mind the way dinner is when you’re really hungry. But they knew what love was and they knew they loved one another and they knew that grad school and teaching English in Watts and eventually four kids was somewhere along the horizon.

It was always hiding behind smiles like a well-kept secret and even the lover’s quarrels about the temperature in the car or the number of years they would give to the poverty- and violence-ridden neighborhood of Watts were about how much they loved each other.

It was sickening really. In the way that chocolate mousse is only good for four bites, I couldn’t hang around them very long. I couldn’t hear the stories about the amazing date on the pier or the way he described her hair in that one poem.

He was a poet. And it always reminded me of how unhappy I was. It reminded me of the poets I’ve never met and, the dreams I’ve never shared and I would shut it out.

“Please! Spare me!” I would kid. I was always happy for her, though. He made her happier then our favorite T.V. shows and our favorite foods and all our shared memories combined. And I knew that somewhere in the back of her mind, always, was the thought of him. All of him, flaws included.

But then they were fighting and trying to make it work out. They were trying to make all those differences that boiled down to the temperature in the car and how many years in Watts mean nothing.

And he said, “I don’t think I ever really loved you.” Shortly thereafter he disappeared. He became something we only heard about through friends of friends and he made a new home cities away and made new friends who thought he always knew what he knows now.

“Abigail,” she said to me, “I wanted to marry him. I wanted to make babies with him and raise them with him.”

Turns out love is painful and hard and we never learn any of that. We hear about the match made in heaven and the one bedroom cottage and the coincidences and kisses and everything in between. We hear about the fight about the temperature in the car and that one time when he thought he might want to be a trial attorney but you always wanted to live in the country.

But what about now? What about when we cry? When we become homesick for somewhere unknown? When we can only lay in grief?

How come we never heard about now?

I didn’t know what to do with all the pain. There was nowhere to put it. We closed the blinds and ordered in and picked at food that tasted like a life we once lived--before now.