I have encountered yet another instance between wanting to get thoughts out of my head and finding a coherent way to write them that would make sense to anyone else reading it. I realized it doesn’t matter because I am doing what was asked of me by the one person it mattered to. I make notes as I think of things or hear things that describe my feelings in that moment and so I just compile those in one spot from time to time.
My thoughts continue to be loud. I worry for the future, and I feel overwhelmed by the present. I still have more questions than answers. Decision paralysis happens every day. I learned what anhedonia is and I experience it daily. The term is tossed around so much but I also learned I may have real PTSD. I used to believe that it was reserved for combat vets and it would be wrong to appropriate that term for other traumas but PTSD is real for many people and for many reasons. Someone asked me not long ago if I ever saw myself finding love again and I heard something on a movie that I recalled. When I said till death do us part, I think I meant my death. I have trouble seeing any future for myself as much as I miss having someone to talk to and have fun with, maybe David was just too big. Too immense to overcome. Too stratospheric. But I miss love. I miss just getting a text. I miss being excited for something. I miss conversations. We had conversations with no guardrails. They were all over the place and that was fun when nothing was off limits. I wish something would take away my desire to be loved. That would be easier I think.
Food isn’t good or exciting anymore. I used to like to cook but seems there is no point now. David would stand at the fridge eating lunchmeat or shredded cheese out of the bag like a wild racoon. He wouldn’t close the bag up well enough or he would eat the pizza I was saving for my lunch the next day and I would threaten to divorce him on the grounds of irreconcilable disrespect for fridge food ownership and I miss that.
Sometimes it feels like the sadness will eat me alive. Sometimes it feels like it happened to someone else. Heard someone say grief will wait for you. And that’s true. No matter how long it takes you have to go through it and it will be right there waiting. There is so much guilt. There is a point when you see someone for the last time and you don’t even know it.
Sometimes my body won’t follow my brain. I know I need to get up but I seem to be in quicksand. When I accomplish something he’s who I want to tell. No one else cares. I think about all the things I miss about him. All the things I could have done better. Been a better person. I better wife. A better friend. I dwell on those last days. I really, really try not to but they just won’t leave me alone.
We used to play a little game “quick what are you thinking at this very minute” and that was always fun. I never knew what he would say. Usually some off the wall deep thoughts about how something was built or something like that. Sometimes it was just funny stuff and sometimes he would say nothing at all, I knew he was happiest with that. For him to have a mind clear of racing thoughts and dreams and wants was a rare unicorn.
He was the nonchalant one. I am very chalant.
I think the second year of grief is worse. You really realize time is passing and what is being missed. I was rewatching a Sopranos episode for the dozenth time and Tony said “every day is a gift but everyday life has a way of picking away at it. Stuff you have to pay for. Stuff you own, spouses, kids..” I thought how true that was. You can’t really enjoy life because life gets in the way and you are busy making plans and then it is too late.
There is no consistency or evenness to my emotions even now. Even with medication. I drive around in first gear and shift right to sixth. I find myself having to traverse between being here in reality and what he would have wanted or thought.
Often if I were laying across the bed reading or even sitting on the couch, he would flop on me like a seal with his whole weight. Maybe he was trying to smother me, but I miss that too. The ups with which he and I put up with each other were immeasurable.
Unhappiness is living between the difference of how we think it should be and how it really is. I live right there in the middle and can’t seem to crawl out. Grief has a dark grip and loosens at weird times and then contracts around your heart the rest of the time.
There is a lot of love inside of me but no place safe to put it. That id frightening. What do you do with that kind of emotion? I have been thinking that maybe we have an emotional heart as well as a physical one. Maybe the coexist and I guess my emotional heart stopped at some point and my physical heart has kept beating. Maybe that is how your heart keeps going when it is broken. One without the other leaves things out of balance. A yin without a yang. Maybe people die of broken emotional hearts because that is where desire and will to keep going lives.
I have learned I also suffer from venerability hangovers after thinking and writing even though I am just writing to space.
The more I know, the more I wish I knew less.
I miss making him sandwiches.