Loss

This month has been difficult. Too difficult.



I never like to use the word broken, because it implies something that has been smashed beyond repair. Usually I refer to my injuries as scrapes and bruises, things that will heal in time. Yet right now, bruised is not an adequate description. Cracked is better, but not quite right. Chipped, perhaps. I feel like I am being constantly chipped away, like every day more of me is worn away by the world, and eventually I will be so small I will cease to exist to the human eye.


I lost a lot this month, not least the two children who I have loved and nurtured every day for the past nine years. Violence did not steal them, nor cancer, nor a tragic accident. Their loss is apparent only to me.


Probably you want an explanation for that, but you're not getting one. Over the years I have tried hard to curb my arrogant tendencies, but one thing that I never mastered was the habit of explaining myself to others. I rarely explain my actions and words. And in this case, at least, a real explanation is not possible. To do so would involve using grandiose words like Destiny and Time and Quantum, and at the end, when you are blinking fast and wondering if I've gone completely mad - instead of the half-mad that I usually am - chances are you wouldn't understand anyway.


Some things cannot be explained with words, even by someone who uses words as much as I do - some things must be FELT. You either know what I'm talking about or you don't, and if you don't, you probably never will.


All too often I hear people giving platitudes, meant to fortify the spirit. Get back on the horse. Plenty more fish in the sea. Pick yourself up and try again. Keep smiling. Move on. Count your blessings. They mean well, of course, but what this well-meant advice tells you is that you must always keep moving forward in life, and it's not okay to admit your sorrow, to mourn for what should have been, to even take a break. I disagree. I think sometimes the only way to keep your sanity is to just stop for awhile.


Right now, I am stopped. For the rest of this month, and perhaps the next, I have pared down my life to the bare minimum. I do all the things needed to keep myself alive - I sleep, I bathe, I fill in paperwork to earn enough money to pay my bills, I even eat - and very little else. Although I do read. Some days all I do is read.


Some days I get dressed. Some days I even leave the house.


I am not suicidal. I will never be suicidal. And I am not dying of anything else that I am aware of. In all likelihood, you will find me alive - and perhaps even well - come October. So I am not dying, and the rest is just details.


Eventually I will pick myself up. I have the end of September in mind, because then I will be able to buy folders and paper and pens, and enrol in uni for the coming year, and start living again. In a couple months I will pull myself out of the hole, and move forward with things, and build a new life for myself, and place this terrible summer in the past where it belongs. I will date, and take ballet classes, and learn to cook some sort of foreign cuisine, and I will smile and laugh, and even mean it.

Just not today.