It is Sunday morning, and I woke up thinking that Alex should call today, because when he does call, Sunday mornings are when he does. That’s about the time he’s crawling into bed in the wee hours of Monday morning after a hard weekend of mostly programming, and readies himself for the work week. I sometimes wonder if calling me is partly like work too; it’s his job. He’s gotten himself a new style girlfriend now, and so the calls have tapered off a bit. I don’t call him, because I’m still really intimidated by international dialing.

My mother is 80 percent certain that his going back to China is 100 percent responsible for my falling apart. She told me this the morning I was packing up for my Chicago escape-route. We sat on the floor of her bathroom, and she told me she thought I was in love with him, and that that’s when all this unraveling started going on. Of course I’m not in love with him, but the only teacher she’s ever had and loved was my father, and that’s why she doesn’t understand.

I explained to her that if he had been here it never would have happened, but his leaving was not the catalyst. I do remember telling everyone that he was leaving because his grandmother was terribly sick back home, which was really just a lie I told myself to realize his family and friends needed him and had been missing him as much as I would. Then in the airport, Aaron had to pry me away from him to let him board the plane because I had him trapped in a bear hug and was screaming No! No! No! ‘Don’t do this.’ he'd whispered to me in the perfect tone to start time back up and snap my head back over my guts again.

Maybe these things mean that I did fall apart- making up lies to make the truth go down. Making one last plea to the cosmos before they took him away on the chance that all this is just one big Aesops Fable on how telling people what you wish for is the only way to make sure it comes true.

Everyone’s just doing the best they can, and some times the struggle to do that makes remembering to act normal blurry and unimportant. Sometimes, when you feel things that people who raised you never knew, there are blank spaces where a tool would have been helpful, but you just have to wing it. Other times, you find the tools working, but you just want to put your hand on the stove to know what exactly hot means. Maybe you just want to remember what hands mean again. I’m not ashamed to know that the stove is hot, not ashamed to know how sweet it is to have top-notch digits. Still, I hide my burnt bandaged hands from everyone, from God Itself, because how foolish it is to have forgotten in the first place; what hot means, what hand means. Only a lunatic could forget…

…or only a lunatic could remember.

Maybe Alex is the greatest example of love in my lifetime. Saving me from myself a thousand times; standing vigil for however long it took. There is no way to pay it back. There’s no way to deserve it. There’s no way to replace it. A guide: a personal gift in proving the density of God.

You stop believing when those things go away. Just letting the chips fall where they may. So many of these God damned chips everywhere.

I love you, My Confessor. All the shrinks and Blogs and best friends in the world will never know.