These waves of emotion always come right when I think im doing better...I try to keep them away, I really do.
At least I know im not manic...C.S Lewis felt the same way...completely insaine amounts of ranting, that never really makes any sense...but hey..lets just let him talk...
"Its not true that Im always thinking about it. Work and conversation make the impossible. But the times when I'm not are perhaps the worst. For then, as though I have forgotten for some reason, there is spread over everything a vauge sense of wrongness, of something amiss. I see the rowan berries reddening and don't know for a moment why they, of all things, should be depressing. I hear a clock strike and some quality it always had before has gone out of the sound. What's wrong with the world to make it so flat, shabby, worn-out looking? Then I remember...
Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wollowed-in tears. For in grief nothing "stays-put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often? Will it be for always? - how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realizedmy loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again ..
In so far as this record is defense against total collapse, a safety valve, it has done some good. The other end I had in view turns out to have been based on a misunderstanding, I thought I could describe a state, make a map of sorrow. Sorrow however, turns out to not be a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I dont stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there's no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicaled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As Ive already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the suprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago....Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?"
I woke up one morning and I discovered that the bond that had allowed me to let someone into my life, to create the person I needed most, the family that I had always wanted, was built on a lie. Nothing was ever the same... Like death, it couldnt be followed, solved, fixed, or pleaded for....it was simply gone, as if it never was. Unlike death however, the memories werent real either....and remembering them hurt more than pretending it never was, because it was all a lie. And tourturously, like an insaine person, I have this ghost that floats in and out of my life, like when you think you see someone you miss so much on the street, or you think you see their car, your heart lurches, bringing back a memory or a thought that was once so good and right, and then it turns toxic...because the person turns around and it isnt them...and the car turns the wrong way...and your left there standing on the sidewalk in pure anguish while the world walks past you, and has no idea why your still standing there.
Except the ghost Im haunted by is real. Looks the same, functions the same. But is dead inside. There is no death certificate, no real cause to mourn that can be seen by the observer. Im alone in my grief.
The only question now is whether to wait on that sidewalk to see the person who looks like him? Just to feel that hope for 2 seconds, and let yourself fall, day after day. Or to never look. Sounds like an easy choice, but if you could talk to your dead, and know that they heard you, even if they never said anything back, would you try?
My mom told me tonight that her dad loved her more than the world, and everyone knew it. But that still wasnt enough to make him stay, he still left her. "Sometimes its just not enough Les, no matter how hard we try. That doesnt make it hurt any less. It doesnt take away the abandonment that you feel, its just the way it is..." I understand her a little more each day, and each day I wish I didnt know her pain...
As bad as it is, I remember that it was much worse. I am getting better. Today I walked by the lake, and I remembered over spring break, holding on to the wall of the hotel pool to keep myself under for as long as possible to see if it was possibley any worse then the suffocating feeling I already had pressing against my chest...it wasnt nearly as bad..at least I had control of it...
I dont have control of these tears though..not tonight. At least I know that these waves of grief are normal... I just wish I had picked a problem to solve that wasnt people...its so painful, and it never stops, and after years of giving yourself, and trying for everyone around you, you end up having to tell your problems to a webpage because there is no one awake, and no one cares. Not even any of the people who promised they'd always be there.
Neat.
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