Dear K, Part 3 of Many

Dear K, 

Outside, I hear the rain. I used to love the way it washed the world, and how all the colors bled together in light bursts until everything was beautiful. But now it feels like a giant version of sadness, like all the world is crying for you. And I'm crying for you, tonight. My heart holds heaviness, a leaking bag of sand limping across the landscape of relics of us; all these ways I miss you:

I miss the way you turned your eyes on me with a hint of a smile, the way your lips curled up just before you'd do or say something to make me laugh. The way you'd do anything to get me to laugh when I was down. I'm missing how if you were here now, first you would hold me. You'd let it be one of those long, lingering hugs, tight and safe. I'd bury my face in your neck and breath you, feel the softness of your skin again my face. And then you'd rub my sides a bit, and look directly into my eyes, searching to see if whatever was wrong had been set right. 

And that was the most magnificent thing about you, to be so in tune that my body language was louder than my words and I seldom had to tell you when something was wrong. Where are you tonight, when things are so very wrong? Where have you gone, Lovey, now that I feel so empty and alone? There is guilt in this heavy heart of mine, wanting to heal but feeling badly for wanting it so. My mind wants my heart to fall out of love with you so we can find happiness, but my heart is yours and yours alone. And everyone says words that mean so little like time and heartache and grief and these things that mean an everything that feels like nothing at all. I'm sick of the blandness of life. I'm sick of the way things look the color of honey: blurry with the kind of slow stickiness that blends together entire days in a mire of forgetfulness.

I am bad at life now, Lovey. My drive is less than half what it was when I was pushing towards the best life with you. My desire is only to get by, only to do something just past the basics to keep from suffering too much. They say these things will pass, that there is no time table for any of this and I hear it and that is fine. But this is just a long stream of conscious when all I want is the comfort of your arms. My head is pounding, threatening a monumental migraine. My skin has gone to shit, lost weight, gained it, lost it, gained it. All of this is shit. Just a big steaming pile. 

How could this have been what was for us, Lovey? How could it? I hope this life passes easy and quick so that in the next blink of an eye I can ask you these questions and you can answer and we can try again. Oh, to be able to try again. I have to believe that is possible. I have to. 

With difficulty and love, 

Leppy

Smiling Through It/Girlfriends & Graduations

It's been a while since I've written, friends. A lot has happened in a short time. I signed a lease and decided to stay in the city (well, in the opposite order). I moved in, and have a roommate for the first time in almost 10 years (heeeey D. Thanks). I made a conscious decision to live with someone...I still don't do so well with being alone. It's like being scared of the dark, when the dark is what's inside your own head. My parents brought back a lot of my furniture, my former life (no cats though; D is a allergic and they aren't allowed here...plus finding reasonable, good housing is ridiculously difficult). Work has been a whirlwind and intense and crazy. And, I didn't have internet until a few days ago at the new apartment, which we lovingly call the Zombie Fortress. Or Zombie Safehouse, depending on your perspective (hashtag a sense of humor). So, here we are, caught up, more or less.

At the time, this would have been a now, but instead it's a then, because time slipped by before I could tell you about it. So let's go back a bit, yeah?

May 21, 2014. The day that K received his Juris Doctor. A Wednesday, smack in the middle of the week and life and things. Early morning, I am in a car down to New Jersey. Man, I hate going to Jersey now. My stomach is riding high up in my ribcage and my eyes are threatening to spill over before we even so much as make it onto the west side highway. On the way over the GWB I'm thinking about how long it takes to fall, and the article I read in the NYT about how the Golden Gate Bridge has the highest number of suicides of any bridge in the country (what is it about serenity and the expanse that comes with the west coast that makes people so committed, I wonder). I can't imagine jumping, having enough time to think and change your mind and it's too late. Or maybe it's all peace and ease and relief? It's not my style, but for some reason it's my thought now. And then just as quickly, we're in Jers, we're in the town I spent the last 6 years in, we're pulling up to K's parent's house. And then it's his little brother at the door for me, and I'm in the living room, perched on the same wood chair I pulled into the kitchen the day of the accident, the same chair where I hugged my knees to my chest and realized that K and I didn't get to grow old together anymore. The day my life changed.

I'm sitting across from K's foldout couch bed, watching his dad tie on K's favorite purple tie ("I'm going to borrow this, okay boy?" K's brother, tightly: "come on Dad..."), me with my eyes wet as I glaze over the poster board of condolences from the kids at the law school, and the funeral program, a framed picture of K, a collage of our pictures that I made him one year for his birthday...and his ashes. His ashes. Again. His ashes. The body of my beloved all crumbled up into something I can't hold or kiss, something that can't laugh or talk, some-thing. Not someone. Not my someone. The beginning and end inscribed on the side, a whole person paired down to dust and dates. Fuck. I'm crying and apologizing to his little brother. I hadn't meant to cry so soon. I'm trying to stop the tears before his mom comes out from getting dressed. I can't, but I'm trying. And so I'm trying to smile through them, smile through all my pain. It's all I've done since January. It's all I know how to do anymore.

We're on our way now, K's family and me, and his little brother's girlfriend. I'm happy to see her, but she seems less so to see me. I know what it's like to be The Girlfriend (more on that in a minute), to be there but not really there, just a fixture for moral support and companionship. I don't know if she feels that way, but I have in the past. More than once in my life. At the graduation, we are escorted to the front. When the processional starts, I'm in tears again. They are pouring uncontrollably down my face, and I don't care if I'm streaking my makeup. K should be here, damnit. He fucking earned this. 2.5 years of hard fucking work, and more late nights than undergrad. No one knows better than me, sitting up with him, reading his case law out loud when he got too tired, quizzing him until I understood the difference between first and second degree murder and manslaughter, or what all the requisites are for a contract (consideration, it's all about consideration). All the hours spent pouring over jobs and fine tuning resumes and cover letters, and learning what kind of law firms K would like. So many hours it was days, weeks. He should be here, damnit, with his class.

Every speaker mentions K in one way or another. I don't know if that was planned, but it makes me proud. I assume it makes his family proud too, but I can only speak for myself. And then it's time. I wish I wore the title of wife, so I could have gone up on stage and gotten his hood and his degree. Instead, the dean called his father up and the whole auditorium erupted into a standing ovation. And my tears were uncontrollable, all the emotion pent up behind my eyes all these months streaming full down my face. But not just with sadness friends, with pride. I don't think I was ever prouder of K than I was in that moment. And I KNOW he was proud. And he should be, up there in heaven. I know he was dancing because he always danced a bit. Always for as long as I knew him, a little pop-lock here, Michael Jackson moonwalk step there. Always a bit of a joke to make someone laugh. I know he was laughing, and dancing, and whether or not you believe in heaven or afterlife or anything, I know he was there in that moment, full of pride and completely deserving of all of the love and adoration and sadness that filled the auditorium in that moment.

After, and we're meeting a few people now. Some friends, and parents of students. "This is K's girlfriend" his parents say. And it's true, I am his girlfriend. I'm also his partner, would be wife. Girlfriend is so fleeting, so teenager. I hate it. I hate the casualness, the insignificance. The way it feels like I don't matter when I know I mattered to K more than he ever let on to anyone but me. I can cherish it, sure, but I hated the way I felt pushed to the side. The way the only possessions I have are a few t-shirts from our trips, a hat, a scarf and a leather bracelet. That's it. I don't even have the second copy of his degree that the law school gave (they give two), or the pictures we took together in a photo-booth in Florida, our last vacation (his dad keeps them in his car). I can count the number of photos we have together almost on one hand; we always took pictures of each other, but didn't necessarily take them together. And sure I have photos and memories, but there's something about the way the soul lives on in things, the way our energy embodies the possessions we love, leaving little traces behind everywhere. I wish I had more of those little traces so maybe combined all together I'd have something significant of the person who captured my heart for the last decade of my life.

So now that this chapter is done, the emotion is coming harder and heavier. Tears are disobedient and flowing more freely, more unbidden. Smile through it, smile through it. My anger is quelling and quiet, but still stirs on occasion. My stomach is unsettled with unfairness even now, and my frustration that people think I'm fine because some months have passed is louder than ever. Sometimes I feel like I'm laying just under a pool of shallow water, looking up at the sunlit surface. Everything is slightly off, slightly blurry. And I'm screaming but no one can hear me, I'm drowning so slowly that no one notices. A friend asked if I was okay the other day...the answer is still not really. I don't know when I'll be okay. I don't know if I ever will be (please don't reassure me. It doesn't help. I just want to be heard). My missing is so loud these days, my heart so heavily broken it hurts in my chest. I don't wish for a time machine, except late at night when it's still and loudly silent and I feel like God might have a moment to listen...and then I beg to be just a bit selfish, just to go back and fix that night. I beg to not be alone anymore.

All my love is misplaced and wandering now, and it all feels so wrong. Being "the girlfriend" and having no claim to anything feels wrong. It's all so unnatural to me, and yet I go on. Sometimes I wonder why I do, how I do. I don't know. I just do. And the smiles and laughter...it's all so false. It's all so useless. But here it is anyways, leaking through, trying to convince the rest of me we have to keep living.

And on that note, goodnight friends. May the next time be a little sooner, and just perhaps an inch less painful.

Music Redux: Childish Gambino - I'd Die Without You

This is Not Okay

How do you say you're not okay without worrying people? How do you make everyone understand how profoundly sick and wrong you feel, without them feeling like they have to rally and do something? I'm exhausted. I'm not okay, and I'm exhausted. I keep considering the profound unfairness, the heaviness of being empty, and sadness. Nothing deep or wondering there. I'm just plain ole fucking sad.

Friday night I got the news that a good friend of my mom's and some one I cared about was killed in a car accident. Some stupid girl was texting and hit her head on. The week before that, another friend's father was murdered. And it makes me want to vomit up all my hurt and anger. It makes me feel so sick. I don't know how to explain it, except that it feels like there is something profoundly wrong going on right now. I feel like the universe is snatching up my family and my friends, or the loved ones of my family or friends. I have heard or experienced or read about so much loss in the few months since K died. And there's that phenomenon of being more aware of something once it applies directly to you, but I don't think that's what it is. I think something malicious is out in the world, no matter what you believe in or don't believe in. It feels haunted and creeping, and disturbed. Dark and undetermined. I wrote this on Facebook, but I think it bears repeating: love hard and leave nothing unspoken. 

Death is a fact of life. I get that. We all have some expiration date, and we don't get to know when it is. I get all of that. What I don't get is why it feels like this. Why it hurts so much in so many different ways. Why loss feels like just that, like this tremendous absence. It makes me confused and my mind contorts around trying to understand it. So I keep writing, because some part of me feels like these words will straighten it all out. But I don't think they will. I keep hearing that my story is helping other people. I would like to understand that better, because all I am seeing now is a few feet at a time. I can't see down the road I'm walking, or even what road I'm on. I feel like I could walk to the ends of the earth and just keep going, and hope that maybe I'll walk right off. All I'm feeling is tired of all of this, and wanting. And it all feels desperate and terrifying. It feels depressed and low and hard. 

Tonight I had a bad dream about a friend's dog. I've been spending a lot of time with this friend, and I generally worry about wearing out my welcome, because I know how intense I am right now. And I appreciate the people who love and care for me, who go out of their way to spend time with me, but I'm still pretty checked out and I don't know what it's like to be around me. I imagine it's difficult and annoying and I try to be aware of that as much as I can. So she has this amazing dog who she loves (and I know how she feels because I had a dog like that growing up), who also loves me (how lucky am I). And I was asleep on her couch, having this dream where I was walking him and he got sick and I was terrified. And I woke up to said dog barking at the delivery man, which startled me, and then suddenly I was just kind of in Panic and felt like I had to leave her house. And then it felt like I should leave her life, like I had committed some horrible betrayal by having this dream. 

I don't know how to explain it, but it felt like the embodiment of everything I've been feeling. Like something had gone wrong for someone innocent and beautiful and hopeful and wonderful. It felt wrong. So I kind of tried to tell her about this dream, and felt horrible, and left her house--fled her house, really. It feels like I don't belong anywhere. It feels like I need someone I don't have, the one person I never worried about burdening or asking to just hold me without question of why. I miss being held by someone who loves me. I hadn't realized how much I missed that, but I really do. Or just having someone to listen who gets you and how you see the world, without you worrying about offending them or whatever. Without you worrying about how it might hurt your friendship. I don't have the energy to worry about these things, but I do. 

I am so overwhelmed by all of this. I want to be anywhere but where I am. But that is not a choice I get, so here I am. I am not okay, but left without choice to be anything but. 

This is Anger

I am unpredictable. Not my emotions, but me. I have no baseline for any response, and offense happens easy. Too easy and it makes me uncomfortable, my own pendulum of happysadangryemptynumb, my own foreignness. I feel xenophobic about myself. Is that even possible? Maybe in some irony. As much so as the fact that there is comfort and familiarity in the way I start hyperventilating rage and yet there remains a grave concern in myself for my inability to tamp down that same anger. This whole bit, this is anger. It's going to be as rough to read as it is to admit, and I wouldn't blame you for stopping now. Just don't judge me too harsh tonight, friends.

Here is something that makes me very angry as of late: anyone trying to identify with my situation. I'm an asshole tonight. Empathy and sympathy such close bedfellows, but the mere suggestion shoots off exploding shiny spots of anger in my brain. The parent of someone they cared about, a friend of a friend, someone they were tangentially close to. Fuck outta here. The anger is so loud then, because how dare they? What gives them the right? I'm an asshole for that too. Everyone is different, and death touches us all. And we react differently. I know this. There is rationality and caring in there too, but I just feel so raw. And so few people have lost their partner the way I have, with the jolting suddenness. With the lack of expectation or preparation. And to be frank, with youth. So don't suggest you get it. You don't. This is Anger talking now. Forgive me. Forgive how I am all metallic and right angles, glass frozen in ice, shards of quick to furry and unforgiving of your trespass. Forgive me when I cannot forgive you. It is unfair to ask, but nothing about any of this is fair.

All this anger rolls over me, rolls me over; themes of oceans and tides maybe, or a strong wind. Color it with something violent underneath, make it ugly. Make it hurt. Let's hurt something beautiful today. Utterly obliterate the innocent. I want scalding water dripped slowly on skin, I want stoning. Give me buried alive, something slow and murderous. Let's get horrific. Let's make it abominable. Oh but Sara, this isn't you. This isn't who we know. I'm sorry, but welcome to me, in After. Welcome to I don't know myself anymore, welcome to when will the space behind my eyes stop being empty. Welcome to when will I be present, when will I care? Welcome to how anger simmers just below my surface, and you'll never know because control. Because smiles. Because easy going. Because I can't let it consume me. Because anger is not me, not forever. Because something more sinister: I am a very good liar now.

I don't want to post this. I don't want you to know this truth, whoever you are right now, reading this. I hate the anger. I hate how easy it is to go to that place, that royal injustice so deep it is a splinter ten miles long through every inch of my body. I'm toying with deleting this. But I got so angry writing it, I have to believe it wants release. I've said I was ugly before, and here is the ugliest. Here is the most pathetic, the most embarrassing. And maybe the most honest, all laid out and spread before you. Judge me. Or don't. Sympathize. Or don't. Know it's not desire that is this anger, but consumption. It is disgusting, but delicious. It is satisfying, because it is feeling. It's the heady smokiness, crowded like a room, where otherwise there is absence. Where otherwise it is empty. And who wouldn't take the fulfillment of fullness over standing in the biggest, emptiest canyon and echoing against yourself forever, mired in solitude. Alone.

So I just breathed out friends. This whole time, holding my breath, writing this. All clenched up and mean. And scared. Because anger is fear. And I have told you and will tell you more, it is terrifying to be this empty. It is terrifying to be new and exposed. And I have no idea who I am. I have no idea who I will become. A friend said this was exciting, this development. This reinvention, this new persona that can be crafted as intentionally or as lazily as I might prefer. Maybe that's true, but I'm not there yet. I still feel like I can't touch bottom, so how can I learn to swim? I can't, just yet. Or won't. I don't know. I do know shock is wearing off and wearing me down. Days have been darker, my personal fog denser and more impenetrable. I imagine if you feel energy and color in the world the way I do (yes I am odd in more ways than just Grieving), I must be some indescribable mix of dirty hues and shades of shadows and tones that exist in nightmares. I said let's get horrific, didn't I?

At work, someone decided my project managers needed to be made aware of "what was going on with me." What is going on with me, actually? Let's have that conversation, please. Let's have the conversation that you have so little idea of what is going on with me, you couldn't define it if it was happening to you. I am an asshole tonight. You all reading this sputter, but maybe they were concerned, possibly caring, possibly trying to help. Possibly some bullshit I won't buy. Tell me when you are eggshells and krazy glue and misery, and you still show up. Tell me when you are still there when by all rights, you should be anywhere else. Fuck it all. Tonight is so angry, friends. Days are angry too, but good sunlight and better company tempers that. I just can't stand that kind of judgement, that kind of false help. It's already hard, it already takes so much trying.

I hope you understand that sometimes it's best just to get it out. It's some kind of tapeworm, this anger, breaking up into little pieces and retreating back parasitic from prying and digging, from the impending excavation. I cannot wait for Somehow. I cannot wait to be myself again, whoever that person becomes. The road is long and uncertain, but I walk, and walk. I love to walk these days.

So much anger put out here, but mixed in to the way I love you for the support, the comments, the reaching out to connect. I am still the Sara you know, I promise (as much to myself as to you).

Order of Operations

I think lately I've been trying to find my voice again. My poetry, my cadence, my prose. Everyone who has read my blog and has said I should write a book, thank you. I appreciate that. This post though, it isn't like that. It's not trying to describe my feelings. It's memories. And memories are often ugly. No apologies, just facts. So let me give you the first memory from After:

8am, give or take. Cold, although the heat's always on too high in my apartment. There is fuzziness, confusion. Everything wavy and slightly surreal. It's too early; I haven't slept much and my head is pounding like it knows we're not sleeping again for months. Maybe ever. I try to put my contacts in, manage one, and leave the other on the sink where it will remain, dried out and sad when I come back to my apartment hours (days? weeks?) later. Take out the other, toss it in the trash. Put my glasses back on. Pace, pace, pace. Talk to my cats, try to explain to the them with no words. Cry a little. Sit. Stand. You see, I am waiting for the police to come and take me to K's parent's house, because this is the morning that K has died. His brother's voice is echoing in my ear. My voice is echoing in my chest from having just gotten off the phone with my parents. Echoes all around. I am remembering this for you because it recently came flooding back to me.

Over the past year or so, K and I were fortunate to make two very good friends. A couple out of Chicago, who went to college with us. I'll call them the Travelers, because they've managed to see the world in a way most people in their late 20s/early 30s don't. We didn't know them so well in school, though K played basketball on occasion with Mr. Traveler. On the day of K's death, one of the first phone calls I made was to this couple. I'm not sure why, but it felt right. And that has pretty much been the name of the game ever since. So just recently I received a save the date from the Travelers, who will be married in a few months. And I was absolutely elated. But as I read the email, I teared up. And my high started to drift towards a low. You see, K and I would have attended together. And even more so, our friends are so very similar to us. Met at college, dated for many years afterwards, made a life together, finally getting married. Echoes all around. After the funeral, Mrs. Traveler sent me a message that relayed a similar idea. All our parallels. So my joy for them is the joy I would have had for myself, and my sorrow is the sorrow she could have had, in a different version of this life.

Another memory now: Dropped off at K's parent's house, there is an ambulance outside, and four or five police. The officer who dropped me, he says if I can be strong for the family, that would be best. He tells me K's mom is having a hard time. The ambulance is there for her, just in case, and regardless of that, I don't doubt the scene I will find inside. This is a mother who has lost her first born, after all. A hard time would be a massive understatement. But this officer, he doesn't know our history. He doesn't know that this is my husband who has died, that we were boyfriend and girlfriend in title only, but the heart is different. Time is different. But I have always had a strange sense of duty, a way of doing what's asked of me, somehow.

And so a few hours later, I find myself in K's parent's kitchen, surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins. Sitting on a wooden chair, trying to stay warm. It's cold and clear this day, but the cold is the kind that wraps around your heart and pulls on your organs, the clarity reminding you that you're still here. That I'm still here, when K is not. On any other day, had we been up early, I would have inhaled deeply and told K it was the kind of morning that made you feel life. But on this day, I cannot feel life with K; instead there is only the continuity from one moment to the next, each tip toeing further away from the last time I saw the love of my life alive.

And I'm sitting there, stoic. Strong for the family echoes in my short term memory. I've been carrying that particular echo for a while now, I think, these past few months. But that day especially, I held it well, that strength for the family. Phone calls and all that. And then suddenly, I am crying, because it just occurs to me how backwards all this is. And I'm telling his uncle and aunt how we were supposed to grow old together. I say that over and over, because that was my reality. I was never the kind of girl to plan her ideal wedding or any of that. But this was my life partner, my love, my spouse in my heart before God and the universe and all else, regardless of rings or papers or promises. And all of that is lost to me now.

And that's really what gets me down a lot of the time. Things are all out of order now. We had nine years together before K got snatched out of my life. Who knew old meant a few grey hairs as I entered my 30s, or that forever had a time limit? I am so excited to celebrate with The Travelers later this year, but when I dance, it won't be the way I would have danced with K. There is a certain joy in being that way you know, a natural rhythm that you have moving through space next to someone who fills your heart. I've thought a lot about the fairness of things, why some people get their partners and I do not get mine. I am intrinsically happy for anyone who finds love that way, but there are elements of jealousy too. I wouldn't be honest if I pretended I never felt it, and if there is one thing I won't do it is lie here in this place. Enough of those go on on to get us through the day, the lies we tell to keep us going, so let's have some truth, yeah?