A few months ago I finally reached the point in my journey through grief where I was able to stop sleeping in the bed with the last three T-shirts he ever wore. I considered this a milestone in this journey I never wanted to take and thought the darkest days of the grief and trauma were finally behind me. The last few days slapped my face and let me know that wasn’t true.
They showed me that the forward and upward movement you make can be followed by falling backwards and backsliding to where you were before. I guess you spend so much time looking back at how far you’ve come that you don’t pay enough attention to the climb that’s still ahead of you. When you make that backwards fall it’s hard to find the strength inside you to get back up and try again. You really just want to lay there in defeat.
These are the kind of days where you get sucked back down into that dark and ugly pit that doesn’t seem to end. It feels like the part in Alice In Wonderland where she falls down into the rabbit hole and she just keeps falling and falling and falling. It seems endless.
These are the kind of days where the ocean looks so much more vast and you’d welcome it if it swallowed you up. There’s a quiet peace in the water and I understand why so many people find comfort floating in it with their ears below the surface. It’s so they don’t have to hear the roar of the bottomless pit of problems they face.
These are the kind of days where I feel your absence much more deeply. A few scattered successes of trying to make my way through life without you aren’t enough to quell the feelings of failure that creeped back in these last few days. Those feelings come with an ugly taunting and they want me to know they’re my overlord now. It’s hard to tell them they’re not.
I guess my subconscious mind and body knew this backslide was coming before my waking mind did. I didn’t realize until I looked at the calendar tonight that today’s the 9th. It’s been exactly ten months to the day since you were so cruelly and unexpectedly ripped out of our lives forever. I guess that’s the reason why I’m feeling this backslide so viscerally today.
I feel like I’m standing at a precipice here. I have two choices; I can lay there in the dark abyss and let it wholly consume me, or, I can crawl my way out of it with bloodied hands and knees already covered in ten months worth of scars. Both doors come with such raw pain and I’m not sure there’s a lesser evil here. Neither door is one I want to knock on but there’s not a third door to choose from.