August

It is August, the other side of April.  It is another month, but for the sheer grace of a beautiful child born in this month, I would wish it to perdition.

August and I have never gotten along.  Frankly, neither have April and I.  They have always been transition months to me and this year has sparked its best battle yet. Transition means change and while I open my arms to change and the challenge it brings, April and August seems to have particular cruelty to their flavor of change.  Except for two beautiful children.  For them alone, I would be happy to suffer Augusts & Aprils all year long, if it ensured their lives.

I am not beaten by the changes that have occurred in my life.  Humbled, devastated with emotions that pour out of me willy-nilly like I am a cracked vase, but the transition months will not win.

I am not new to loss and I am not new to grief.  I have learned to appreciate its talent in coming in waves.  I've remembered how to navigate my own memories and impulses to swim deeply in sorrow. It is one thing to dwell, it is another to drown.

I am not allowed to drown.  Although, I can never live for two, I can do my damnedest to not leave two children with another painful memory and one with an absence of even that.

Do you ever wonder if your chest was cracked open and your heart lifted out if it would be riddled with holes, some that made it all the way through and some that only were noticeable when your heart was held to the light.  Paper thin tissue holding on, perhaps.  I like to think that the paper thin tissues are cracks that have started to heal, but I have a suspicion that they are just marks of steady wear and soon even that sheer bit will be gone.  Maybe this is how people die of heartbreak, their heart is so thin and fragile like coral that one more hole just shatters the complete organ.  Does the the heart ever actually heal or does it simply scab over and harden?  I hope it heals, despite this pain I really don't want a hard heart.  I already have a hard head ;)

Where is my head

I can't seem to pin it down. I am doing the things I need to do to survive.  Baseline is taken care of, but what about more?  This is the goal of my 30's. To learn to move beyond surviving.

I feel 28 again. I have all the strands I need in my hand.  I can keep them from tangling and knotting up.  Now I just need to braid it all together, but I keep stumbling and having to unravel my own mistakes.  Nothing is running smoothly and I am so tired from just hanging on.

I don't want to relive this year, or any past year.  Smacks too close of stagnation.  I dislike this lack of function.  My own capability gaps are widening instead of closing.  This is not what I want.

Damn him, for this tail spin.  Damn him for this regression, for this depression.

I want to be back.  I want back, I want better and I lack the patience to wait.  I guess I need to find the energy to run.

Sharing

Marta has been living in my head for almost a year now. See Marti (as she prefers to be called) is a character in a story I've been working with off and on.  I was horrible to her, you see.  I killed her love.  Sent him spinning down a mountain with the rest of her theater troupe.  It was cruel, but necessary. The story is about loss of self within grief so strong that reality fades. So to create the environment that would breed such despair, I had to go to such lengths.

Now I am afraid to touch the story.  Afraid that I will lose myself in Marti, and she will lose herself to me.  Am afraid her man will turn into T instead of being someone over there.  I will cry harder then I could imagine when I detail her receiving the news. It's just a bare outline now.  Not because I couldn't bear it, but because I couldn't bother originally.

How cruel I was, to kill off someone so important and not even grace them with detail.

I wonder if that is what holds me back from finishing.  The fear that I will lose my sense of distance.  Lose the last bit of separation between myself and my fiction.

I see her in my head, curled up on the corner of my bed.  She eyes me with curiosity and kindness.  She keeps quiet, plaiting the long grassy strands of our grief together.  Creating blue green baskets to hold all the memories.

We are already intertwined.  What use is fear now?

Anger

I am still angry.  Not at him, though.  At her.

So very much at her.

She was always this distant speck of mild concern.  Someone who could send him into a tailspin with a mere few words.  Which were usually about money she needed.

I knew he didn't talk much, but what I didn't know was how little she listened.  How clear that became in April.  That month of pain so sharp I couldn't breath with it.  Of loss so deep I still can't see the bottom.

I keep trying to understand what gives her the ability to command the last vestiges of him.  To literally throw away pieces of him.  To disgregard so callously those who have loved and treasured him.  Even when he was at his worst, even when he purposely lashed out and distanced himself with cruelty. Isn't that what makes a family?

I suppose she is just following his lead.  He callously disregarded us and left in a horrible manner, but him I forgive.  Would always forgive, could always forgive, because I knew what lived beneath the depression.  The illness that caused him to be blind to those around him.  Created such a world of isolation that he felt there was only one way to escape.

But what is her excuse?  Grief? Grief causes people to act in bizarre ways, I know.  I think the part that keeps coming back and keeping my anger alive is that April seemed to be less about him and more about her.

About how she was perceived, deceived and treated.  Nothing about celebrating the life of her son.  Letting a man she knew he loathed wear his clothes and speak at his funeral. Write his obituary.  The obituary that described someone I barely knew.  That man didn't exist except in her head.

I keep writing obituary after obituary. Wake up with it half finished in my head and I complete it on the way to work. Every morning.  I need to write it out of myself, but a part of me is loathe to even let that go.  I need to.  His birthday is coming up.  Maybe that will be my last present to him.

Ache

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

My brain is wrapped in gauze.