So many thoughts.
Andrew’s absence is sinking in slowly, drip by drip, moment by moment, into my blood, into my waking and sleeping. I do sleep now. I eat. I get hungry. I enjoy the sunrise - friend's phone calls. I alternately push people away, and draw them in. I meet a friend and tell her how Im really feeling, the roiling sorrow, the hurt that’s like a - the liver, I keep picturing a liver, as I did in the hospital - slab of brown meat,
irregularly shaped, bloody, dark, that’s what my hurt feels like, throbbing, panting underneath everything else in and around me - does anyone want to read this? Now? At any rate- I tell her this, or try to, I try- to tell her EVERYTHING - and…OOPS.
Too much. She's - I fear I'm traumatizing her now, challenging her beliefs in Goodness and Justice and Fairness and Hope. And Life making any sense at all.
I can see the overwhelm, the lifted eyebrows;
Maybe should have stopped at, well, earlier?
Should have stopped at the greeting, the hug.
She - carefully - told me I was always intense.
At this- I shut down. No more to share.
Later, I think - am I too intense?
Is this intense?
Am I labeling it intense?
Am I, purposefully, making this worse than it is?
Um. I don’t know.
I think it's pretty bad.
Pre-tty,
Pre-tty
Pre-tty
Bad.
******
I called a friend , a widow, we hadn't talked in years, she'd moved to LA. And her husband, 12 years her senior, had died 15 months earlier. Longish illness - early onset dementia. Terrible. 2 kids, Abadi’s age. The phone call was hard. She was angry. She told me all the places I was in -all the places I would go. Prepare yourself, she said.
How do you prepare yourself for awful?
She didn't say.
I guess it is a sort of preparation to know exactly what’s coming.
Even if you can do nothing to make it less awful.
Maybe knowing lessens it. Don't know yet. Oh, I didn't like her predictions at all.
Look at me wanting Hope from the future now! Tables have turned.
“Oh, the death is fresh!” So fresh.
There's an oxymoron if ever there was one.
Well.
All time references are unbearable right now.
Time will move me further and further, drip by drip, away from the charmed life I had before. Which was the dream, and now the nightmare unfolds.
Drip by drip.
Time will heal.
That is not accurate -I'm sorry.
Time will change things.
My body, my face, my hair. My heart.
But heal?
It will alter me. I will integrate Andrew's death.
Against every instinct in my soul.
One day. I will.
Best, most accurate, most honest?
TIME WILL.
Yes it will.
But not today. So I'm being asked to have patience, it seems with how long the reaction to his death will occur.
But that isn’t much use to one right now.
In this moment.
Nothing is much use, nothing feels good.
Except being able to state that!
Feels amazing.
Time WILL.
early May, 2023
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