“Oh, deep black Despair!

How I suffer, how I suffer—just in being alive.

I feel Infinite Grief.

Oh, Infinite Grief”

— Mary Maclane, I Await the Devil’s Coming

It’s 7:30 a.m. when Emmi’s opens, and I’m already there. The only place I go where I feel safe. He’s never come here. He doesn’t know this pocket I’ve carved out. He’s haunted every other place—shown up when I wasn’t ready—uninvited, unannounced. Even silence isn’t safe from him. But Emmi’s? He’s never touched this place.

I sip a small Americano—in a for-here mug, extra room, with half and half. No sweetener. No steam fogs my glasses—I don’t wear any—but still, the world feels blurry, like memory trying to organize itself into something that makes sense. I don’t sit. I stand at my favorite spot—the tall window-side table facing the quiet street. I keep my back to the room. Easier to pretend no one else exists. My Honda is parked just outside. My car. My home.

He’s not here. Of course he’s not.

Mornings have always been my favorite. Before the noise. Before the world reminds me of its demands. There’s something sacred about that first light—how it peeks over the mountains and doesn’t demand anything of me. Just shows up.

This summer’s been strangely generous: nights stay cool, and the air holds its softness well into late morning. Crisp. Unassuming. The San Gabriels off in the distance still look half-asleep, fog pooled around their peaks. The world hasn’t asked anything of me yet.

The weather allows me—invites me—to wear my signature armor: my Leo Carrillo corduroy sweater—huge (XL) and soft—thrown over a loose dress, knee-high socks pulled up with care. My bangs curtain my eyes, and my ponytail is tied high with an oversized bow. I feel like myself here. Unbothered. Small in a good way.

And for a moment, that’s almost enough.

But even in this quiet—especially in this quiet—he finds me.

The thoughts are relentless. He lives in every moment of every day, even when I sleep. I dream of him every night—sometimes as he was, sometimes as I need him to be, and sometimes as the reality I can’t escape: him gone, choosing someone else. There’s no border between night and day where he isn’t threaded into the fabric of my mind—I should be charging him rent.

“He didn’t mean it,” the gentler voice whispers.

Soft. Familiar. The one that still hopes.

“You were the first to see through the mask. The first to ask him to take it off—at least with you. You asked for all of him. Asked him to die to himself as you were dying to yourself. Raw. In the open. To hold each other’s pain and feel every ounce of it. That—

that terrified him.”

I wrap both hands around the mug. Let the heat try to ground me.

“I didn’t ask for much,” I murmur, barely audible. “I asked him to help. To grow. To stop pretending survival was enough.”

“It wasn’t pretending”, the voice pleads. “It’s all he knew. He didn’t have the tools, the capacity.”

“I was dying too…I’m still dying!” I want to scream. “And I still showed up. I still stayed. I’m still here!”

Silence.

Then—

“You know how unresolved trauma rewires a person. You know how his brain works. You know what he’s up against.”

“Yes. And I still didn’t deserve to be betrayed, to be abandoned, left to figure out life alone while he figures it out with someone else.”

Tears begin to roll down my face. I don’t care that I’m in public. I don’t care who sees. My body’s only way of processing what my heart can’t carry is to let it leak out my eyes.

“He said he wasn’t in love with me.”

I close my eyes. It doesn’t just hurt in my mind—it lives in my body. The pain sits in my chest, in my throat; it sinks my stomach and settles into the places where memory turns into psychological pain and the body carries what the mind can’t hold alone. The sentence echoes just as painfully as it did the moment he said it. I remember the blank look on his face, the way his eyes didn’t even flinch. That blank stare. That hollow quiet. I knew then: he was already gone.

“He told me, ‘I love her.’”

“He didn’t mean it.”

“Then why did he take the life we built and hand it to her before he even left?”

“Because she was soft. Safe. She didn’t make him look at the things he didn’t want to see. She still doesn’t. Even worse—she asks not to know. She doesn’t want the truth. Not about him. Not about us.”

“And I did.”

“You were never easy. You still aren’t.”

No. I was true. I was the mirror. I loved him enough to ask him to face his shadows. His parents didn’t pass him pain—they passed him masking: the performance, the perfection, the instruction to hide his wounds until the hiding became his identity. And beneath all of that lived the unspoken trauma and the devastating losses he never allowed himself to feel. I wanted him to face those shadows so they would stop owning him—so he could finally meet, and be, the authentic, genuine self he was meant to be.

“You asked him to do the one thing he didn’t believe he could.”

Tears continue to roll down my face as I sip. The mug’s half-empty, like every promise he made.
Yet, I continue to exist.

"You’ve always seen him—his light, his shadow—all of him a kind of beauty he never allowed himself to accept and believe."

“I never asked him to be perfect. I just wanted him to stay. To fight with me. For me. To choose me—us—fully, every moment of the rest of his life, ‘always,’ ‘forever.’”

And he didn’t.

"No. He didn’t give up. He sank back into the noise—into the masks and performances that felt safer than truth, than beauty, than love, than freedom. He chose the places where he never has to face his shadows or live his truth, where he never has to choose completely. Not himself—us, me."

"But you were the awakening he wasn’t ready for."

And I wasn’t his—not outside the shadows he chose to live in.

More silence.

“Maybe he never stopped loving you. He just didn’t know how to keep loving you.”

“Maybe. But knowing that doesn’t bring him back.
Even if he knows we’re meant for each other, he’s still choosing the easy way out.
Choosing to run. To numb.
I know he’s not coming home—
not because we aren’t real,
but because being real hurts.”

But I still love him.
I always will.

The light outside warms. The fog begins to lift.

I know he’s not coming home.

What was once a bad dream is now my morning routine. And no one’s coming to shake me awake.