Letter to Sam, August 10, 2024
Hey bud.
I really miss you today. RobBob and I have started going to the gym. We did some very baby arm weights. My arms are sore today but not too bad. I wish we would have gotten into weight lifting together. I would have loved being able to hit the gym and be gym bros or whatever lol. You’d make fun of how many stickers I put on my water bottle. You would have been such a patient, encouraging gym buddy.
Tomorrow marks one month since you died. Like a lot of traumatic things, it both feels like it happened yesterday and a year ago. This journey of grieving you is so confusing. Somethings I am wondering why I don’t feel wracked with grief, guilty that all I have is this numbness. Other times, the smallest things set me off, like catching RobBob watching Top Gear.
I get it – that is textbook grief. Which I know, intellectually, but actually being emotionally inside it is just bewildering. I know it’s cliché, but I feel lost without you, buddy. I promise you, I know I am going to be okay. But all I wanted to do today was text you about how much I lifted. And I’ll never be able to.
I love and miss you so much, bud.
Grief journal entry, September 26, 2024
Prompt: In what physical spaces do you feel closest to your beloved, and what do you feel?
One of the places I feel closest to Sam is the gym.
The gym is both very fitting and very ironic. Sam and I never went to the gym together. We never really worked out together. I had an unhealthy relationship with exercise for a long time, and then struggled for a long time to get healthy motivation to actually go. But at the gym, it is easy to picture Sam how he liked to be – healthy and fit.
I like to envision him on the treadmill next to me, giving me fist bumps of encouragement or making funny faces. I listen to the Tacoma Tunes and picture his smile. I sometimes get what I call my “grievy hand aches” while I am working out. That’s when I feel my grief physically, along with an urge to hold Sam’s hand.
I like that I have a place that isn’t just one location to feel his presence. I could go to any gym, anywhere, pop on his playlist, and spend some time with him. In this heartbreaking, bittersweet, fucking awful, lovingly cathartic way, pretending to make new memories then watching them disappear into the ether as I shed a tear of both sorrow and love to the melody of Indian Summer.
Bye, Buddy 
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