Not supposed to be here.

Now I pick up again. I revisit prompts. Now almost nine months out. I try to write again because I am drowning, Listen to where I left off. It is most pertinent now: 

What does a shift in your grief, even a tiny, momentary one, mean to you? What does it say about loss? Or love?

“The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.”―  Roberto Bolaño, 2666

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This is the void. Welcome. It is not grief anymore. It is a deep depression. I kept up a frenetic pace. I took a second job. I ate dinner with friends. I went to the gym six days per week. I listened to music and got sad. I avoided my bed. I avoided the quiet here with my words and my heart. I was doing “so well.” And then the void came. It was all that was left. It is a void and it is all that I have. This void.

Empty.

I am not just sad anymore. I am not just grieving you. You have become a sadness that is not outside of me but a part of me. Your sadness has integrated. It is consumed. It is a parasite. It eats my heart. My hope. It is not a thing that happened but a thing that is me. This is what I was scared of. When this loss becomes a part of me. How do I let you become a part of me when your loss is so heavy? It pulls me under. I lie in bed hating the people that I have to stay alive for, hating how hard it is to be alive for all of you. Because the pain is so deep, the depression so strong that I don’t know how to keep breathing except that I have to.

From an email to Brian:

I feel as if my emotional spectrum of happy to sad has been replace with apathy to anxiety. One or the other or often a confusing cocktail of the two. Like right now. I’ve done nothing at work today. I didn’t do much for our short week last week either. Even played sick on Monday. I’m not proud of it. I actually feel stomach turning shame about this behavior. But I don’t care to do anything about it. Don’t know if I even could do anything about it. And finally don’t care to find out if I can or can't do anything about it. SO, I give zero fucks and it makes me anxious as hell. But I can still do a mean tap dance to make sure you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It’s going to be a grueling winter.

He called and gave me the you’re-tough-suck-it-up-speech. I didn’t go to work for two days.

It’s been nine months. I’m supposed to be better. I’m worse. I’ve integrated. And it’s awful.

I think all the time. I’m not supposed to be here. I shouldn’t be paying someone else to fix my bike after that bad accident. I shouldn’t have had to ride home bruised with my handlebars cockeyed after that accident. I shouldn’t have been riding at all. I should have been riding a bus to you and met you in a McDonalds parking lot. Where you beamed at me from the car the second my hand touched the passenger handle.

I shouldn’t have been in Aspen for Thanksgiving drinking and doing drugs. I shouldn’t have sobbed my way through a snowy run on the Roaring Fork River, as beautiful as it was. I should have been in bed with you trying to make a baby. I shouldn’t have been drinking whiskey at 4 AM. I should have been nestled in your arms whispering to you through a nightmare.

I shouldn’t be in this basement, listening to a band you’ve never closed your eyes to. I shouldn’t be cozied up to a dog you never met on your bed that I inherited. No matter how dear this dog is.

I shouldn’t be a shell. I shouldn’t have to lie all the time. I’m not supposed to be here.