Georgia
I’ve got this thing about looking at the moon lately. It makes me feel connected to you. Because I know, with one hundred percent certainty, that during your lifetime, you’ve looked at that same moon. It’s all I’ve got right now, G. The moon, the stars, and the sun. Even the air that I breathe, I take in great gulps and wonder if there’s even a remote chance that it’s maybe air, that at some stage, you’ve breathed. Is that even scientifically possible I wonder?
I know I don’t bother to post these letters to you anymore, but still, I continue to write them. They help me sort shit out in my head. You could always help me sort shit out, you always gave me a different perspective, a different way of looking at things. I’m an over thinker, and I analyse everything. But you, G, just go with your gut. You react on your first instinct, all guns blazing. I hope that hasn’t changed. I hope you’re still the Gia that loved me so passionately. Is it loved or love? Do you think of me at all? I could ask your brothers and Jimmie but it still hurts so much G. I’ve tried to move on but there’s nothing there, there’s no connection, not like we had. It makes me panic sometimes, makes me doubt that the way I remember things is just my imagination prettying it up. Did we really love each other that intensely? We were so young, was it even possible to feel the way I think we did at such a young age?
I wish you were here to answer all of these questions. Perhaps if I had answers, it would give me some closure. It’s been almost three years. Are we different people now? Has too much time passed, has too much life happened to make what we had ever work again for us? Coz I do believe that, G. It will happen. I don’t know when or how, but I just know that our time will come. We will talk, we will work things out, and we will live, laugh, and love the way we used to. So, whatever tense you might be using, I’ll stick with the present. I love you, Gia, and until the day you come back to me, until then, I’ll keep looking at our moon and breathing in our air.
Sean and Georgia. Georgia and Sean. The way it’s meant to be.
I’m sitting on the floor of my office with a cup of tea in one hand and this letter from Sean in my other. I spent all of Saturday afternoon trying to organise everything into piles. I’ve worked out which are songs and poems, and I’ve messaged my brother to come over and look through them with me. There’s a pile of VCR tapes, but I’ve no clue what’s on them; some have labels and some don’t. It doesn’t matter because I don’t have anything to play them on anyway. There are some notebooks and diaries, a few photos, and then there are the letters.
When I had this crate shipped to me in Australia, I put what I could in sequential order according to the post office date stamps. Somehow, they got messed up, so I had to just go through them as I got to them. Because most were never posted, there weren’t any date stamps, and if Sean hadn’t written the date, then I tried to work it out by the things he wrote about.
I’ve read five letters today, but this is the first to make me cry—the first to break me. I think the thing that did it was the similarities in our thought process. I would often look at the moon and think along the same lines. Were we ever looking into the sky at the same time and thinking of each other?
Cam puts his head around my office door, which I’ve kept closed as I don’t want the kids seeing me upset, especially over a man that’s not their dad. His warm smile is gone the instant he sees the tears on my face. He comes in and closes the door behind him.
“What happened?” he asks, while squatting down in front of where I’m sitting, legs crossed, Indian style.
“Words,” I reply.
He smooths some stray hair that’s escaped from my messy bun and tucks it behind my ear.
“Well, words were his thing, babe. He wrote songs for a living, bloody good ones.”
I sniff and nod my head. “I know. I know that …” I trail off and blow my nose on the tissue that Cam passes to me.
It’s all suddenly too overwhelming. Why the fuck am I doing this to myself? To us?
“I’m so sorry, Cam. I can’t imagine how this is making you feel.” He leans his back against the my pop art wall, stretches his long legs out in front of him, and then pulls me into his lap. He remains silent as he does this.
“Does it bother you? Be honest with me, does it bother you that I still cry for him after all these years?”
I turn and sit myself so I can see his face, his eyes dart all over mine and he lets out a long breath.
“Georgia, I’m only human, of course it bothers me to a certain extent, but at the same time, I’m one hundred percent certain of your love for me—”