Time
I needed a fix last night, a fix of him, so I decided to pull up a chat archive and relive an evening’s conversation. It’s been my sort-of habit to pull up whatever today’s date was, so I pulled up Easter of last year, which was a week later but it didn’t matter. Oddly enough, I had been doing plumbing that day, just as I did yesterday, and he had been working long days, up against a deadline. Apparently, Easter is for plumbing where I’m concerned.
As I looked for the Easter chat, I was shocked to realize that I didn’t have to scroll back very far. It hit me hard, and I felt it in my chest, and I moaned without really meaning to. It just came out. I think my heart itself cried out. Time is catching up with me, pulling me away. The time between March and July last year is now shorter than the time between July and now. It’ll be 9 months Sunday.
9 months.
And what has been born of this 9 months? I don’t know. An undercurrent of sadness that maybe was always mine, but that he kept at bay through his natural positivity and wonderful humor. A belief in a universe much grander, much more amazing, and safer (as a whole, if not from my point of view), than what I can experience through my senses alone, including a belief that life really does go on and that death is just a doorway. A new foray into a hobby I would’ve never tried had he still been here, but that is infused with him in so many ways. And a continuing confusion, or rather, a lack of answers and the struggle to accept that.
I feel the ups and downs still, but lately I question whether they’re related to grief or to life, of which grief is just one part. I wasn’t always a super-happy person before he left. But I was so low after he died that…well, it’s indescribable. Those of you who read here know. I realize that I have no sense of what my usual emotional rhythms used to be, before he died, or before he came into my life and brought a lot of sunshine and smiles with him. I have a dark side, like anyone, and a tendency to wallow there unless prodded out by something or someone as a balancing force. He was that for me. When he was here, I had someone to encourage my idealism, my optimism, my general feeling that life was good, because he was the same way. Now, I don’t really have that. Those in my life are more likely to encourage my negativity, my complaining, my cynicism and my critical nature, a rut that’s so easy to fall back into. So I’m not sure if things are really so bad, or if they are in fact normal ups and downs that everyone goes through, or what normal looks like when I don’t have someone whose positivity and Zen equanimity regularly pull me back from the abyss.
New things I didn’t realize were affected by, or the result of, his absence, like this, keep cropping up. It seems I will never be through tallying this loss.