Saying Goodbye
When Hilary told me that she was leaving in less than five days I didn't want to believe her. She wasn't supposed to leave until August. There was still so much we were supposed to do and now our time was more pressed. All of the things we planned were going to be put on the self, maybe for forever. Hillary was now going to the Navy.
When we were finally able to get away together we went off to do the only thing we had time to do. To collect the flattest river rock and some Colorado dirt to break the Indian curse. For those of you who don't know Grand Junction is under a curse. For whatever reason someone felt the need to curse "Happy Valley". Now anyone who lays foot on our soil will be doomed to either stay forever or always be destined to return. Neither Hilary or I want that, so we did what was necessary to find our own ways and identities in the world beyond Grand Junction.
First we collected flat river rocks by my house. There we found a guy "hunting" fish with a bow and arrow. I couldn't watch him long because his catch was lying on the ground gasping for air, at first I thought that it had to be the last of the brain waves stopping but he lay there gasping and flopping for a very long time. We stared at it for awhile with morbid fascination. Than I turned to Hilary and said, "Let's go do what we came here for this seems too inhuman for me." So we walked back to the little stream coming off the river that was unusually high.
Digging around in the dirt not looking very hard for rocks we found a silver chain someone had lost. Hilary let me keep it saying she already had enough jewelry. If she didn't give it to me I probably would have fought tooth and nail for it (which I was getting ready to) because all of a sudden it became so important that you could have said my life depended on that silver chain. I felt like a child there searching for rocks for my collection and wanting everything for myself. It wasn't fair Hilary found the best rocks, they were so flat, I felt ridiculous and silly because I was jealous of her.
Once we finished the first part of our task we went to Juice Stop to fuel up for the hardest part of our journey, scaling the height of the Monument to get our nice, red, Colorado dirt. Since she wouldn't be here for our youth groups retreat to Glade Park I decided it would have been a good place to collect our specimens. Unfortunately, it had been a long time since I had made my way to Glade Park and I went the wrong way. I went down a road that look vaguely familiar, but everything almost looks the same up there. So almost anything could look familiar even if I'd never seen it even one time.
As the sun started setting I felt an urgency building up inside me to find Glade Park. This is what I would forever remember as the last thing I did with Hilary before she left for the military. I was almost frantic. Tears tried to fill my eyes but I refused to let Hilary see my distress. Soon Hilary just told me it was getting late and she needed to get home, so I pulled off to the side of the road and we grabbed some dirt of the side of the "mountain" and put it inside our ziploc bags. On the return trip down I was at a total loss, I didn't know what to say. Hilary was leaving me, I felt abandoned and she hadn't even left yet. So we sat in silence. Than the song "Losing My Religion" by REM come on the radio and I turned it up and we both sang to it even though I don't think either of us really knew the words. This will be my last memory of Hilary before she left, us singing to Losing my Religion overlooking the always growing valley nightlights behind slightly blurry vision.
Started 8:15pm June 13th, 2005
BreathingNow
posted by GlassBubbleDream @ 10:33 AM
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