if I could take the fire out from the water

You know that feeling that washes over you when you're walking alone down a dark road and the only street light goes out while you're standing underneath it? That's the only way I can really describe the emotion that occurred when I read what you said would be the last message you'd ever send me. I didn't feel lonely, or afraid, or even sad, but this strange mixed feeling of all three. 

The feeling of the only light illuminated burning out to leave you only with the moon. 

I didn't delete you from my life because you told me to, or delete your friends numbers, or all the history of us on my cellphone, or any social network where we could reach each other, I did it for you. For your mind.
For your heart.
For both of our sanity.
Because I was a bad thing, terrible thing.

I did it because it was all or nothing for you, and I wanted the middle of that, the comfortable spot in your bed, but away from your heart. Far, far away from what made you love me.

I can't say eating pizza will taste the same for awhile. Or listening to Wolf Parade. Or seeing lightning bolts drawn on paper. Or watching that Scott Pilgrim movie that you loved. Or drinking a Sierra Nevada. Or fucking in the shower. Or hearing about the new episode of Breaking Bad. Or adoring sunflowers. Or espresso- the list could go on for a little, but before I could find everything that reminded me of you, time would pass. And you would heal- forget. And maybe between that time you'd hate me instead of love me or miss me, and I'd miss your bed, your chest, your comfort and hair. But I'd be okay too. And maybe we'd be friends again, like before you wrote me that song and sang it at all your shows. Before I got in your bed a year ago after your 20th birthday. Before feelings were felt and attraction grew into infatuation.

The weird thing with street lights, the thing I don't understand each time it happens, is that the same street light that went out on you a few weeks ago will light up right as you walk by. And the feeling is completely different. 

It's a safe feeling- that the dark road is just a familiar path you took earlier that day when the sun was in the sky and you were singing, 

"give me your eyes, I need sunshine."

everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

It makes me so sad that I have so much to write about and I haven't documented anything in what feels like ages: moving into a new house that I love full of kittens and sunlight and good coffee, dating the boy I dated a year ago who loves me and I'm fighting to love back, starting school at a university I never imagined getting into that both my father and grandfather graduated from, watching my mother become sober and start life over not selling drugs, reconnecting with New York after my best friend moved there to follow her heart while it's making mine go crazy, my favorite bar going out of business, the one I met everyone I love, the one I spent many nights there finding myself and seeing you and her during my darkest days and drinking until everything became very blurry and then very clear.

But then again it's just life happening that goes undocumented, and it happens all the time in these incidents that make me happy or make me cry and it effects everyone around me, naturally, like an earthquake- a book falls off a shelf, or a glass cup breaks on the cracked tile, or maybe your favorite shirt gets carried away in the rubble, the catastrophe, the beautiful disaster. But everyone picks up their fallen books, or cleans the glass up after putting some shoes on, and they may never get that favorite shirt back though they carry on. 

In short little sentences, I'll get it out though, because I need to. Because these things have happened. And time has still gone by- sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one still lingering. 

It took her under two months after we had left New York in June. Three days before she left, she finally was ready to spill the news- she was moving to Brooklyn. Just like that, it happened. Charme stood before me to say goodbye in my house that she was supposed to live in with me, and in an instant the floodgates opened. We cried and it was sad but it was going to be okay she said, because I'd go visit and two years would go by fast. I'd be there with her someday sooner than we could both imagine. I believed her, but it was hard, because time seemed to sludge by. I couldn't be more excited to be there in December next to her, to feel apart of something bigger than myself again. 

My house is lovely, my new roommates are humble, there are animals constantly running around the rooms keeping it perfectly chaotic, the windows have sunshine billowing through them, the AC has been off and the weather has been allowing it- I feel happy and organized, but I'm not. At least it's the perfect anchor, the perfect idea of what I'd like my life to be like someday. 

Mars Pub is closed. It will never be again. I will never see the same group of regulars walk in alone and sober, or wasted at the end of the night and lonely, ready to play pool or avoid an ex lover or run into them, write on the bathroom walls or throw up in the toilets or do drugs off the sink with their best friend, taking phone pictures in the graffitied mirror that read above it "hipster fuck", pee behind the building when the bar was too busy, punch the wall of the drug court office next door, give out cigarettes like candy... at least that's a short list of what I did. I can't recall another bar, or house, or building other than the one I grew up in that felt like home besides Mars. It was made up of this family that was only understood by the people who constantly went there and knew each other, but outside the bar barely saw each other at all. I remember the first time I went there vividly, drunkenly, during the first Wet Paint Party, and the last night it was open. It was a school night, a Monday, and once the beer ran out kids just started bringing their own. As the night was ending and it hit 2 A.M., people chanted "Mars! Mars! Mars!" over and over while Gabe and Melissa and the rest of the crew stood on the bar before everyone they had served and gotten close to and eventually loved in their own ways. And there was anger and resentment in the air mixed in with beer and broken glass and everyone was so happy in that moment, in all those moments at that bar, but then the sadness came and it was heavy- I don't think I've ever cried so hard in public. 

Cassie, a beautiful girl I had met there that at first was standoffish but is now one of my favorite ladies I've met in my time here, she held my face as I cried and called me baby and told me to look at her and repeat, "everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." And at first I couldn't but eventually I got lost in her eyes that were brown and watery, that reflected mine, and I felt better. 

I had lost something apart of me, apart of the reason I had loved Gainesville so much. Mars was my favorite planet in the solar system that is downtown- any other planet can't compare.