Emotions

Warning: This blog could contain sudden outbursts of anger and colorful language. Not appropriate for children.

You know who you are,

How can you hate someone who is dead that you love so damn much that it makes it so you can't breathe when you think of them, when you see their name? I do though, I hate you.

I have no idea to this day why I chose him over you. I didn't even know I had you. Isn't that stupid? How did I not see. You came up every damn day after work ... and I assumed it was because we were friends. Nothing more. I was so blinded by the hurt I'd been through I couldn't see that what I wanted was at my front door. After all the years I wanted it for.

And then there was her. I felt obligated. Didn't I owe it to her to give him another chance? To try to make a family work? I'd failed one already. I didn't want to do it again. And I chose him. Over you. Obligation overtook my blinded heart and I walked away from you forever. I did that.

But I had wanted you so long. I can remember every look, every touch, every hug. I remember the night of the accident, the night of New Years, the times at Moms, the way you'd hold my kids, the way you looked when you were in treatment, and not once did I love you any less than I do now. I can see every stage of you, from 16 to 30, and remember every breath as if it were this moment.

And it wish it were. My life stopped on July 16. I felt the truck hit me, the way that everything on this earth crashed into me all at once. And I don't want to let go. I don't want to breathe again. I don't want to wake up past this day and feel anymore, because if I move forward, I am moving farther away from you. And I don't want you to be gone.

You were my compass, my rock. My constant. I longed for you as an angel longs for wings. I could breathe because you did. You loved my children as though they were your own, and in a way, they were. I clung to parts of you I could pass on to them. Did you know that every single one of them has an Irish based name? I chose them for a reason, I felt pulled towards them. I would look at you holding them, playing with them, and I felt something I've never felt before or since. My baby bear especially. She was at home there. Just as I was in your company.

When I heard you'd married, I was startled. It was then that I decided I'd never get married again. And here I was, engaged. I sabotaged left and right, and yet I was a fool. I knew we spoke no more, that the chance had forever passed. Its who you were. I felt like Juliet. Every man I've ever been with knew that my heart belonged to you, that my soul was yours, even though you never knew.

The day you left us, I locked away my heart, my soul. They had lost the other half to themselves, and it feels so unsafe to pull them out, unprotected. I hate that I love you and you're not even here anymore to know or to ever love me back. You weren't supposed to leave.

You weren't my spouse, but in a way, you were. You were what kept me going. The first time I drove to Moms after you passed, I cried. I cried so much I pulled over. If you watched over me at all, you know. I saw trucks like yours, bikes like yours. Your face as I pulled in, your arms around me, your smile. I wanted to die along with you. I cried myself to sleep at night, I felt cold ... alone. And I still do.

I locked myself up, stopped going anywhere. Ignored friends, made bad choices. I became reckless and depressed. I tried time and again to force myself out. I am still trying. Its not working.

I feel so broken. I ignore guys, sabotage dates, find ways to make excuses to be too busy to meet anyone, see anyone. I'm scared to death, to be honest. I don't want anyone to replace you. I don't want to love anymore, to feel anymore.I'd rather stay safe, lonely, and let you live every single day with me because no one is competing for your memory.

I hate that you died. I hate that I never had you. I hate that I am not allowed to feel like this because you were married to someone else. I hate that you're not here to dry my tears and be my rock. I feel like if I move on, that you're so much farther away than you are now, and I can't handle that. I don't think I can really live without you.

I don't know what a day farther from you would feel like. What does it look like? How do I breathe? I know that time is going on, even if I cant move on with it. Don't you see? This is why I hate you. I hate that I love you and because I love you I stopped living.

How do you get to the point where you can live again ... and be ok with the person living through you? How do you make it past the day that they died, and not feel like you will collapse when those milestones hit every month? I haven't figured it out.

I'm so angry, so hurt, so sad. I can't stop tears at random moments. I see your handwriting, and my whole world crashes to a stand still. Someone asks about the kids names and I can barely breathe as I try to explain. I see someone with your name, and I hope against hope that somehow they will become you or be just like you. People bump into people that look like you, and I am jealous of them. What I wouldn't give to see your face, to touch you just one more time. To have a chance to tell you.

And yet, about all of this I feel stupid. Silly even. I have no right to these feelings. I have no right for my life to be on hold.

But it is. And I'm not sure when or if it ever will not be. I'm afraid of what lies beyond this moment, this time. Of what getting past this means. Will I forget you? Will I forget what you felt like? What loving you meant? I can't live a life without that, without you.

I fight this war every night, over living or loving you. Living has yet to win. I've convinced myself that as long as I am alive enough to function for my kids, thats all that matters. Everything else in me can be numb.

I've created a world in which I can talk myself out of everything. Out of every risk, every effort. I give up easily and don't try hard enough. I've convinced myself of the tediousness that is dating and learning another person to escape the hurt that I never knew was possible until you. Until you passed, it was still all a game.

I've created the illusion of busy-ness, so I have an excuse, a way out, without giving it to myself. I am no longer me, and I have no idea who I am without you breathing the same air, looking at the same stars, sleeping under the same moon. I am adrift, lost, and without a compass.

I hide away the emotions behind a dam of epic proportions. To let the tsunami loose is to risk ... and I can't allow myself to risk, when I don't even know who I am when you don't exist. If there is a balance, a way to exist and let go, I've not found it yet. Looking for it ... might just be too scary.

Loss Blog Pt. 1

So this will be a loss blog. I don’t know if it will cover a series of blogs, but it will be long, I can promise that. Within this year, I have lost much. I won’t use names, but I will use truth, and I will use emotion, which is my own perception of truth as I try to walk through this healing process and deal with the broken edges and fight lines along the way.

I won’t apologize for the way this will ramble, the disjointed nature and shape that it will take. I already know this, I already am familiar with the curves it has, the juts and the ravines. You aren’t yet, but you will be. It may be familiar to you as well, or it may be as foreign as a distant land. Either way, this is real. This is my life.

I cannot say when it began. It feels like its just been. This year has torn me to shreds and created scars so deep that even the superficial makeup of a smile I try to wear to hide them every day is beginning to crack. And in all of this, it centers around the loss of people who made me me, who I identified solidity with, and who shook that solidity to the very core. Its forced me to see me, and often, I don’t like what I see, and I feel crushed to the point of being unsure of where to start again. This is a journey, the journey of a loss.

When I met him, I felt like we would be forever. I know when it changed, and I will never understand how. I did what I could, but I think in it all, I was not her. I was not the chaos to which he was accustomed. I was a different kind of chaos. I will never believe she stole him, I never had him to begin with. As apart as they were, when she threatened to leave, I was a mere fleeting memory of someone to whom love had once been professed. I was the secondary prize when she decided that she wanted and deserved more - and so I believed this of myself when he returned to me. I never again trusted a movement, a word, an emotion or an intention. I suppose, it was me that pushed too hard. I think I will probably use that sentence a few times in the course of this journey.

Its been near a year now since he walked away, without looking back. He has moved on, and I cannot. I miss his smile, his laugh, his touch. No one understood why I loved him, but I did. I saw what we had once had, who he had once been, the way he had once loved me. I could feel it every now and again, when we could reconnect on a walk, or in a simple note, or a surprise lunch date. But I also saw myself as invisible. Not in his mind if I wasn’t there … and I felt the weight of that cloak as though it were real. I wanted him to see me all the time, and I pushed to far in finding it from others, lingering over admiration and respect I was given at work… the way people paid attention. I fell too fast and too deep into the pool of attention, and suddenly, abruptly - though really, there was no other option for him - my world uprooted in a night. Inevitable, yes.

Even more the loss of him to me, I feel the loss of him to them. I hate to hear the tears at night as they cry in their beds, the whimpers of “Daddy” in their sleep. The questions as the oldest one ages, doesn’t he love me, why isn’t he here, I miss him, I want to go to his house. I don’t know what to say, so I just hold, and wipe the tears off their soft cheeks. And I cry too. I offer to her to call, and she shouts back at me, he won’t answer. I don’t know what to answer to that - because she is right, he rarely does. And he never calls. She doesn’t understand, she knows she is lovable. I want to call and tell him - to make him show her… but I can’t, and I know that. I have her call anyway - hoping against hope that he will answer, he doesn‘t - and her voice is a mouse-whisper as she leaves her tear-filled fearful message. I try not to think it, but she knows as well as I do that it won’t be returned. And the little one, she knows not. She doesn’t remember life with him here at all … I’m her entire world. I feel for what she doesn’t know.

There are so many questions unanswered. And the way he fought when he got home, as though we had a chance, I feel as though he was biding time, knowing my weakness for him, until he found a replacement. It hurt so much when he started dating again, the way he plastered the proud announcement over his pages online, and I could imagine the way he looked at her. Then he wrote to me about how he asked her out, and it hit me that he had done and said things that in 4 years I had never come close to hearing or seeing …. I was not enough, to earn or have these things to him.

I can’t write any more on him for now, the thoughts are jumbled and angry and confused and bittersweet.