requiem for a good thing

This morning I picked up my camera with the intention of taking some pictures as I walked home through Central Park after work. I haven't taken any pictures for several months, for the same reason I haven't been writing as much as I should, and as I cycled through the memory card I came across several photos from my 30th birthday. My girlfriend had taken me to Mohonk in upstate New York, and most of the pictures are of two people very much in love spending a freezing cold November afternoon outside, holding hands and smiling in spite of the weather. There were other pictures too from the year we spent together, pictures of us on my bed finishing a crossword puzzle, biking across the George Washington Bridge. There's one of her rolling the dough of a pizza we made together. There's the first picture we ever took, taken by a stranger in Soho before she left on a business trip.

It was a relationship that, aside from a few brief mentions early on, went entirely unremarked in this blog, and of all the things that have happened in the world and to me since I last wrote anything here -- the election of a black president, turning 30, starting a novel -- it is most surprising to me that this relationship, easily among the most important in my life, left no paper trail. Beyond the pictures there are other mementos, certainly (ticket stub from a Sigur Ros concert, postcard from Budapest), all of which have taken on a terrible new weight whenever I come across them. The relationship was wonderful, and although it has been over for some time, I still find myself stunned in its aftermath.

Like most relationships, it probably would have made for uninteresting conversation. We did the things couples do. We played cards together. We cooked dinner and watched The Wire and did crossword puzzles. We grabbed lunch if I was working near her office. I usually bought her flowers at the bodega around the corner from where she lived. On Christmas we both flew to California to meet each other's families, and in July I ended it.

It's a dirty fucking trick that you can be so in love with someone who isn't right for you. A dirty fucking trick. And it's a dirty trick that you can be the one that ends a relationship and still be reduced to rubble. I loved her very much, and she loved me, and I ended it. On some days the reasons are clear to me, and on others they're so dim and far away that they seem to vanish, but even on the best of days I still feel her there, the way an amputee still feels the fingers of a severed hand.

It's a testament to the easy life I've led that the hardest thing I've ever done is break up with a girl. I've never had to pull a friend out of a pile of brick and metal after and earthquake, or care for a dying family member, or sleep on a vent in the sidewalk to keep from freezing to death. Life is a parade of far worse things happening to far better people than me, just one more asshole who dumped a girl and came to regret it. Yet it is also, I suppose, a testament to the weird emotional and biological impulses that drive us, that even as the world burns down it is love that fills our lives with purpose, and its ending that steals it away again. Part of me believes that. The rest of me just feels bad.

So then, the last few months have been chockablock with first (and inevitably last) dates, irresponsible drinking, a few meaningless one night stands thrown in to force me to realize that, oh shit, this isn't really that fun anymore. And while I've slowly been able to piece myself back together again, every once in a while I'll come across a ticket stub or a post card, a pink sock in the bottom of a drawer, and it all comes crashing back down again. One step forward, two steps back. You know how it goes. All together now.

Will those mementos, those artifacts of such an important time in my life, always haunt me? Will I ever come across one of them and feeling anything other than a sense of longing and regret? In the pictures she's shuffling cards, leaning out over a frozen fountain, walking toward me with a birthday cake, maybe just smiling at the camera. They're just pictures, straightforward and maybe even boring, the way other people's pictures usually are. There's nothing to suggest the intensity of emotion, the love underlying the moments of quiet domesticity caught in the camera's flash, overexposed, a little blurry.

Do I save pictures or delete them? Do I keep the ticket stub in my wallet or tear it up? Do I throw the sock away, or do I wait for the day I can hold it in my hands and feel absolutely nothing?