The hole.

The thing with falling down a rabbit hole is that there's nothing to hold onto. No brakes, no pause button and once you get going there's no turning around. 

This sensation has its pros and cons.  Sometimes its free-falling, just letting go and trusting what will happen, but if you're planning on doing it sometime soon here's travel tip #92: it helps to have a companion on your way down the hole, a teddybear maybe or some other familiar face. 

When I fell down the hole I didn't know this ofcourse. I found out the hard way.  I needed to grab onto something familiar, something to make me feel safe in the dark.  I've always been afraid when the lights went out.  So: there I am, falling down a hole, and suddenly I see it just off to the side, drifting about and screaming my name.  It's my previous relationship, the one I thought I 'd left behind but it's there in the hole with me, waving its arms.  At least that's what I think it's doing and heck you don't have to ask me twice.  I grab at it and hold on. 

We become best friends, even better than me and Cellini Euroline.  I hide it from other people but I nurse it in private.  I nurse my dead relationship.  I prop it up in a chair across from me and pretend that it's alive.  We have tea together and although my relationship doesn't have a whole lot to say at the beginning it becomes increasingly talkative as time goes by.  It seems that maybe I'm not the only one who feels the need to hold on.

I go to my dead relationships facebook page sometimes 3 times a day and analyse it like the Bible.  It's the only face it has now and I unravel it like poetry.  It becomes my Oracle.  Me in a hole, reading its face, learning its language, searching for clues.  I feed it scraps of my life and tend to it in my sleep, and as time goes by I come to believe that my dead relationship is coming back to life, that it's growing when in fact it's bloating with decay.

We play Reunion over and over again.  It's my favorite game.  I dress him up and paint on eyes and a mouth.  My art project, my favorite passtime.  He waits for me in a public place, wearing his best suit and a nervous smile.  I walk in, we hug and his smell curls up my nostrils like a meal I haven't had in years.  He kisses me deeply and I suddenly remember the taste of his lips, because somewhere along my journey I forgot and I've been trying to remember for months.

Down the hole I find myself again and again bumping up against this body floating with me in the dark.  We waltz in the loneliness.  We play dress up and pretend. 
 
One day I prop my dead relationship up and tell it that the wait is almost over. I'm coming home baby, and then we can put all of this behind us. But my dead relationship is silent. It's Facebook face blinks quietly back at me and I search for answers on a shiny screen. A deleted post on its wall where we sent each other a (x) at the end of mutual messages. An Iheart to another woman and she sends one back. I die when I read it, and slowly fade on the lights. 

My imaginary friend, it turns out, is dead, a grotesque parody of it's former self.  A ghost.  A construct of my mind. 

Today I buried him deep in the ground like a ship sunk to the bottom of the sea.  I made a coffin out of my memories and wrapped him in my hopes.  Before I closed the lid I put a teddy in beside him.

Dear dead relationship,
I dragged your body clean across America.  I was your witness, keeper and your breath of life.  The only attendee at a small backyard funeral. I cried when you went down and proudly sang a song we used to play late at night in cheap hostels when we were scared,

and my song rang out like a shot in the dark.