Easter Week and Missing You.

I thought Easter would be really hard this year. I prepared myself for the grief to creep up my back and into my skull. I practiced breathing into it, forcing a smile back towards it, so that my boys wouldn't notice anything but the thrill of finding their baskets and over-sugaring themselves at Grammy and Pap's house. 

It wasn't hard. I didn't really feel much. I went for a run and I drank a few beers and the kids had fun and I went to bed. 

So you can imagine my surprise when yesterday, your absence hit me like a ton of bricks, a barreling train, a knife to the throat, no creeping sadness, just crushing hurt at the disappearance of your light from my life. 

Maybe I prepared myself too well for Easter. Maybe I just didn't give myself time to allow you to cross my  mind. 

I hope you aren't hurt that I avoid dwelling on you much, but the thing is.... I can't. I lose so much time. I think of you and suddenly, it's evening and I haven't done a damn thing. I get so lost in it, the overwhelming, all-encompassing, never-ending-ness of your death. It's a lonely and shitty place to be, you know? I would have called you to talk to you about it, to see what you would say, but you're gone and I can't. And so I sit and try to summon the courage to imagine what you would say. 

It just-- it feels like I'm drowning, my body, my head under water with my clothes and hair swirling, dragging me down, and I keep reaching my hands up above the surface, waiting for you to grab on and pull me out. I'm free falling from a tall building, a tower, a ledge, and I'm not scared but I wish you would catch me. I wonder if this is what it felt like to be you. 

And, you know, I thought that the summer days and the warmth and the sunshine would make me feel better and make things seem easier, but the truth is, I miss you so much more in the light of day. I just keep expecting you to show up. I keep thinking I could call you, maybe, you would pick up, maybe I could take the boys to finally see your place and go to the park like we said a million years ago but then things always came up for one of us so I didn't ever make it. I keep hoping you'll text me and tell me you're in the area and you were thinking you might stop by if I'm home. 

And then the tears come again and I am picturing you in a million ages and I keep thinking about leaning over the casket, how I watched a tear fall onto your chest, how if this was a fairy tale, my tears would have brought you back to me. 

I wish I hadn't wasted so much of your life being mad at you. If I could go back in time, I would do it over and over again, just to be with you. 

I miss you. 

Still so heavy.

I keep having this dream. I'm driving home from Mom & Dad's, but I'm younger. Or maybe I'm older. I'm not who I am today. It's nighttime and it's raining, pouring down, so hard that I can barely see the road..... but all of the houses have these ponds in the backyard. And there are helicopters in the ponds. No, actually in them,  underwater, with the thing on top spinning, making small waves, smaller than what they should make. The sound is deafening. They're looking for someone..... Someone is missing. They are looking so hard, and it is such a desperate search, they're in all of the ponds. It has this strange Jurassic Park feel to it.
The thing is, I know that who they are looking for isn't in those ponds. I don't know who it is, but I know that they are gone. I feel a grim and heavy weight in my soul over this, but I don't tell them that their efforts are fruitless. I let them hold onto their hope, even though I know there is no hope. I just keep driving.

I am floundering.
See.... I think, right now, the worst part about grief is when you begin to feel like you should be getting your shit together again.
Has it been too long to be falling apart this way?
I am so lost without you.
I can't concentrate on anything.
I can't breathe.
And I can't fucking feel right, it's like... there't this thin layer of film between me and any real feeling. It's there... but it's like I'm holding it with latex gloves. I can feel it, but I know it's not the real thing. I'm laughing and I am crying and I am raging, but I want to rip these gloves off and touch it with my bare hands.

I don't know who I am without you.
I don't know who I am at all.
I want to reach out but I can't bring myself to actually ask if anyone else feels this way. How could I? I don't want anyone else to feel like this.
 Like a part of me is literally gone, as if a part of who I am has been ripped away and now I am left to question everything I thought I knew.
Like how I knew you were invincible, even when I yelled at you that you weren't.
Like how I knew you would always be there when I needed to call you, even if I wasn't there for you.
Like how when I forgot details about some funny story from when we were little, you would be there to fill them in. Now it's just me, telling a story, not us, sharing a memory.
Like when I thought I might be remembering something wrong, I could always ask you, because you remembered everything.
Like when I thought I was totally fucked, you would always be there to tell me it would work out. And then it would.

But now you're gone, and I just am in total disbelief.... but if I am really in disbelief, then why am I so heartbroken? Why do I cry every night, as quietly as I can, why do I cry in the car, why is your favorite band the only thing I want to listen to, why do I wish I was locked in my room growing up with you across the hall telling me to come out?
Why do I picture you standing here, asking me what's going on, picture you shifting you weight from foot to foot, never standing totally still, and then feel like I have a puncture in my lungs, a slow leak, letting out the air I need to breathe in?
God, I hate this more than I can put into these stupid fucking words that don't mean anything because they aren't bringing you back to me.
And I want to not be mad, and I'm not, but I want to scream at you anyways because I was counting on you, you know? And you fucking let me down.
I'm sorry. Because I hate that I think that, and also because I don't REALLY think that.  I hate that because I let you down so much more and I wish that I could turn it all around, reverse the clock, save you, save you, save you.
When in reality, this probably hurts so much because I always knew you would be there to save me. To say the right thing. To listen to me bitch. To laugh at my kids. To do everything first. To let me know it's not so bad.
And time isn't slowing down, the world doesn't care that I need more time and every day is further away from the last time I saw you laugh, the last time I called you, the last time I laughed at some horrible meme you posted on facebook, the last time I heard you change the words to a song to a version you liked better.
I just don't know how to be without you.
I wonder when I will figure this out.

Messages to my dead brother; part I

When we were younger, after Mia had died, I did this thing. I imagined all of the people I loved dead. Systematically, I went through each loved one. I have continued this weird evaluation ever since. I imagined how it would feel to lose you many times. If I love you, I have imagined how I would feel if you died. I pictured the immediate and I pictured the future. It's not even a conscious thing anymore, it's just a weird tic, a gigantic cry for help, a defense mechanism from the horror of losing a piece of the fabric that holds me together. I have to admit, my imagination must be awful. I never mustered up the shattering heartbreak that is you being gone.

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