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“What’s a little risk now and then, huh?” He rushes past me and turns so that he is walking backward, facing me as he talks. “It makes you feel alive. It brings you crashing into the here and now. Keeps you alert and grounded.”
Death and grief make everyone around you vanish because death and grief are intolerable.
I want my mother right now. I want
her so desperately that I physically ache to have her hold me, and it’s absolutely bullshit that I have no one.
“You need songs that make you feel. Some make you strong, some make you weak. Some build determination, some tear you apart. But you need all of those.”
“Run through the pain.”
I think that you dwell on parts of things and then brush them away. Stop fighting it.”
“You scream it in everything you do. You’re holding on to what happened because you think that’s all you have.”
Your world fell apart.”
“You were left drowning.”
“And you’re struggling to breathe.” I am. It’s a constant struggle to stay near the surface. I have just enough air to stop me from totally going under, but not enough to thrive.
“So do it. Breathe. Just...
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“You have the here and now,” Chris says. “You have a future. Deal with the past so you can stop looking back. It’s just pain.”
It is surprisingly comforting to know that other people in the world suffer like I do. It’s a stupidly obvious realization, but I’m starting to understand that it’s been hard to see outside of my own pain.
other people have problems and haunted pasts, just as I do. I am not alone.
I am holding on to the past because I think it’s all that I have. And by clinging to my guilt, I get nowhere.
He is telling me to protect my heart, but to love. He is telling me about timing, and dreaming, and surviving. And mostly, he is telling me to abandon my worry. To find joy and to live again.
But the best thing about having her around is that I have a friend, and friends, I am learning, can change everything.
that. It’s smart to end relationships that are poisonous.
It’s a good thing. Sometimes you have to cut people out of your life to make things better. So you can move forward.
I get to have a taste of what it’s like to lean on a higher power, to believe someone is watching out for me.
I know how it feels when I’m not myself, when everything that I’ve pushed down gets twisted and crazy and resurfaces in the most destructive way possible.
you have every right to hold tight to whatever gets you through the night. Know what I mean, sugar? Maybe you believe that coincidences aren’t coincidences. Maybe you have your own version of a higher power, or you trust in the belief that there are connections among seemingly disconnected parts of the universe. Maybe you have a spiritual side that has nothing to do with God or religion, one that’s just your own.”
My secret wish to believe in fate, spirituality, or something so I don’t have to exist with only
the cold certainty I feel that there is nothing bigger than random chance.
Life is not fair, but it is what we have to deal with. And we are going to deal with it so that we can live. No, so that we can thrive.
There is no set pattern to grief, despite what every stupid psych text has told me. There is no time frame that dictates when and how you’ll feel what you feel. You just get to deal with hell however, and whenever, it hits you.
We can’t change the past and the choices that we’ve made.
“You are the great love of my life that I’m never going to have.”
I am the queen of wishful thinking.
he reads aloud to me from old paperbacks at night, and there is something incredibly intimate about it.
also look for the times when he is vulnerable, because I like taking care of him. So far these moments have come when he is asleep or during certain moments when we are making love. Otherwise, he tries to shield me from what he sees as weaknesses, the things he thinks I don’t want to see. What he doesn’t understand is that seeing him with his guard down is what I am ultimately after, however afraid of it I am. It will show me that he has let me into his heart in a consequential, profound way, and it means that we have a chance at longevity.
A massive storm of information has engulfed me, as I knew it would. That’s how a storm with such power happens; you sense the build and darkness, you prepare as best you can, you do what you can to get through it even as it devastates your entire world. Whatever you do, however much you brace yourself, you will still be caught up in forces that you cannot control. So the question is how to navigate through the chaos. It takes thought, and trust, and serenity.
