Loss

At least more days than not, it feels as though you have lost everything. The rhythm of the waves of loss can crash you down, dragging you out to sea in the undertow.

Intermittently interspersed on other days, you chart a little progress. A sense of doing a bit better seeps in. Mild hints of a new rhythm take shape—like the faintest shadow of a six pack emerging on the abdomen of an obsessive gym rat. The new habit of passing the kids off through school numbs the pain in your heart, a little bit. Somehow, it is easy to imagine them merely spending a few nights at a friend’s house away from you. Until the dog looks around, whining for the children that play with her and all the kid chores remain undone—little post-it note reminders call your bluff in your pretensions--your life is not the same, and never will be.

You live in a small apartment, now.

You look out the patio door at an apartment advertising sign.

You share your kids with someone who doesn't love you anymore and maybe never did.

You sleep alone without somebody next to you snoring or talking in his sleep.

And while the sleeping alone part might be an improvement over the nights of hearing him talk out loud while he dreamed of their lovemaking, as he moaned her name again and again, you still miss the comfort of lying in another's arms. You miss having your Other--your someone.

Being forsaken is hard. Difficult.   

And moving forward, of course, the predictables are hard—the anniversaries, the birthdays, the Christmases, and the Thanksgivings—all the events and celebrations, sometimes with the children, or without, sometimes alone—now you relate in your grief to the presence of an absence.

The predictables are difficult, but the unpredictables pummel, blindsiding you, catching you off guard at just the wrong time.

Taking your 13 yr old son to the Symphony—it’s not the Symphony, but rather the drop off at evening’s end, where the strangeness of it all punches you in the gut. You pull up to your house and your boy scrambles out of the van to run inside as you fight the same inclination, the automatic default habit of turning off the engine and walking inside to tuck him into bed like you’ve always done. Instead, the boy you pushed out of your own body is walking away from you and the air is catching in your throat and the drive home is fostering the need for tiny windshield wipers on your eyes.

Even the house--your own home--seems to mock you. Looking at the trim--that you begged him to help you paint--that you spent weekends painting alone for months, you are struck by the fact that it remains unfinished. Mimicry of your unfinished relationship. The house seems to stare back at you, looking into your soul. The windows clearly, wondering what-the-hell you are doing in backing up the van and driving off.  Even the burgundy Bougainvillea—that he would not let you have for so long—that he always resented because its flowers might drop into the pool—that you fought so hard to have—feels traitorous as it cloaks the house in beauty and continues to grow skyward, as if there could be something, anything, not entirely dead in the world in all of this loss.