Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Who are you?

I look in the mirror
I don't recognize who is looking back at me
I am what's left
One side of the portrait

Is there beauty in pain?
Maybe, but the pain remains
I am half of what we were
No beauty of life can replace that

I am what remains
It is a very different view
I don't like it
But I must see it

You are so alive in my dreams
The waking world wants more
I can only survive
I can't offer what we would

I am alone in this beautiful hell
Of love and family shattered
If only you could come back to me
Until then, I am lost.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Where are you?

I write this as I listen to cars traveling in the snowy, slushy rain making that lovely swooshing sound that used to send a sense of calm through me. It is a calm that I can't quite capture through my grief but I am reminded that it used to be there. It is unseasonably cold but I have the windows open anyway. I need the fresh air. Is it a coincidence that you leave me in the same year we don't get to have a spring? I don't know but it feels like the weather is mourning you too.

I search for you everywhere I go. I know this is common but it still feels so lonely not finding you anywhere. I look for you in your chair, on your side of the bed, when I'm out running errands. Every time I walk the sidewalks we traveled together I imagine you there next to me, smiling that beautiful smile of yours but then it isn't real and I keep walking alone, without you.

Our animals look for you still, not as much as they did at first but I think they still haven't quite figured it out yet. I've tried to explain it to them but I know they don't understand and probably never will. I don't know how their minds work but I just hope that they don't think you left them on purpose. I don't know why but that is important to me. Your love for them was so beautiful and I want them to know that it still exists somewhere. It has to because it has to still exist for me too.

I was always the skeptic in our relationship and you opened my mind a little bit but I don't know where to put my beliefs right now. Christianity was never our thing but some sort of spirituality was always a part of us and without you I don't know where my spiritual beliefs land. All I know is what I have learned from the moment I met you, I believe in love. I believe it has its own energy and energy never dies. I don't know if we keep our consciousness when we go but something tells me that that love energy is so strong it remains with us after we leave our bodies. I have to believe that.

You were my everything, S. In fact, you still are my everything. My grief for you consumes me but I don't know where that will lead me. I don't know how long I can hold onto that and still exist in this earthly realm where our energies are tied to these human bodies and we have linear time and responsibilities...and loneliness and emptiness.

I would love to figure out time travel and relive the last ten and a half years with you, maybe even be able to save you this time but that would get me nowhere as we don't have the power to stop death. We don't have the power to stop time. We don't have any power at all over how this deep love takes us over and then is replaced with deep gut wrenching pain when it is broken into pieces.

I will keep looking for you, I don't know how not to. You are still everywhere around me...but now you're nowhere too. I love you so much, S. To the moon and back. Always.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

Galaxies

Your picture sits on my desk with those eyes, those wonderful, beautiful empathetic eyes full of love. They have little galaxies in them. Is that where you are now?

I can almost feel your touch as I cry surrounded by deafening emptiness.

It's Saturday today. Before you left this world, we would be enjoying the day, working, goofing off, working, goofing off. You would ask what we were ordering for dinner in that impish way of yours knowing that I should cook but am too weak against the joy we both got out of ordering in.

We would have a movie decided on by both of us and be looking forward to watching that with our takeout.
Right now, you would be showing me something you found that you were excited about either work wise or home wise and we would be planning furniture for our new apartment, for our new adventure. The adventure that you were a week away from signing on before you left this world.

Who am I now? What am I now? I am so lost without you. Me, the woman who was so independent and loved living alone before meeting you. You were the first man I ever wanted to truly marry. I was so proud to call you husband.

I keep staring at your beautiful eyes, wishing and willing them to become real and for you to step out of the photograph and hold me and reassure me that this was all a nightmare and everything is just as it was. This was just a test to see how much I missed you and I passed with flying colors. You knew I would. I would punch you and say what a cruel joke but I would also cry with tears of sheer joy and happiness as I did it. I would laugh and dance and sing as loud as my terrible voice would let me. You would smile and laugh as you watched me celebrate the fact that you're back for good and I never have to lose you again.

Alas, none of this happens and I am left staring into your eyes in a two dimensional photograph. All that I have left of you. Now my life feels like it's missing that third dimension. I now know what a two dimensional life feels like. It is a life without meaning.

Is it better to have loved and lost then not to have loved at all? I honestly don't know. This pain is harrowing but I also can't imagine the past ten and a half years without you. Why must all love come with pain? It doesn't work the other way around. Not all pain comes with love. So why does love have to do this to us in this realm we live in?

I long to be where you are, I long to be in the ether looking down on us poor fools who chose to come to a place where you can't have love without pain. What is wrong with us? Let's promise that we'll never come back here. Let's stay up there together and never part.

I don't know when I'll see you again but please know that my love for you will never die. When my body does, my love will carry up to you and we can join together as one again. Then, I can be whole once more.