God is a used car salesman
and
You get what you fall for.
Flip a Coin
Sometimes I want to live.
Really live.
Live up to my potential,
Live with purpose,
Live in a way I never have before.
Other times,
I want to die.
Conundrum Continuum
There’s a depth and an emptiness, or maybe I mean to say there is a depth TO the emptiness, and that sounds counterintuitive because how an anything that’s empty have depth? But that’s grief, that’s what I feel like. Hollow in a way that has a thick texture, lost but boundless, empty to the core of my being – as if my essence and all that makes me, me has been leaked out into the ether – and yet still able to hurt profoundly, in a way I have never hurt before.
Number One Rule
If you’re not sure how to act around someone who
Just lost their dad
(Meaning he died very suddenly)
And assuming of course that their relationship was good
(Or super close, like in my case),
My advice is simple:
Don’t say dumb shit.
That’s it, that’s the advice.
You don’t have to give me a hug.
You don’t have to know the right words.
I don’t need a casserole or a gift.
Just… literally…
Don’t say dumb shit to me, that’s all.
Don’t compare my grief to yours.
Don’t tell me what my dad “would want”.
For the love of the myth of the Christ,
Do not tell me he is in a better place
and please, please,
Don’t assert that he was more important to you than he was to me.
(i.e., “Sure you lost your father but I lost my golf buddy.”)
Little known but verifiable fact:
Assholes aren’t excused from being assholes because they’re ignorant.
So… there you go. Follow this one rule and you’re golden.
Thanks for coming to my seminar.
Journal (new title?) 9-27-21
I am out of my mind with grief.
You probably wouldn’t know it to look at me. I went to my gym class at 5:30 this morning and genuinely had a great time. Chatted with friends, danced, and made sure my Fitbit recorded calories burned. Followed that up by screaming and crying in my car on the drive home.
Each day I go to work, go to meetings, go to lunches. The grocery store, the bank, the park.
It’s all so surreal.
All day long I see people going about their lives, unaware of how boring they are, getting upset about things that measure infinitesimally trivial in the cosmic scale.
I want to shake them, reach out and grab them by the shoulders and and scream at them – “How are you doing this?” But not really how… more like why? “Why are you doing this? Why are you still delivering the mail? Why are you mowing your lawn? Can’t you see? It doesn’t matter! Nothing matters anymore!”
But they don’t see.
It’s like those movies where a person has become a ghost and they frantically try to get the attention of the living, failing over and over until they realize… the only one who is having this experience is them.
(Is me.)
“Don’t you know?,” I shout at them in my thoughts. “My dad is gone. He’s gone!” My entire world has been thrown off its axis and strangely, everyone else’s world is still spinning. Up until now I believed it was all the same world. Now I can see that it isn’t. My stomach lurches at my newfound understanding.
This is the most disoriented I’ve ever felt while learning something new. Usually acquiring knowledge helps me to feel more grounded, rooted in certainty, almost giddy to add something brand new to myself. I do not feel any of that now. No, this new experience feels like a terrible weightlessness, like fumbling around at night in dark unfamiliar woods. Cold, frightened, separated… and daybreak is nowhere in sight.
…
Enough of that for now. I snap back into myself, sitting silently in a car I don’t remember parking, facing the two-tone brick exterior my the apartment building. …
To be continued(?)
Notes on Absurdity
It feels like someone has taken my insides… out.
Eviscerated? Drawn and quartered?
I’m like this body-snatched version of myself, but no body has actually been snatched. I know that because nothing has been replaced or substituted… so it’s not like when an alien or demon or something takes over… there’s only emptiness in here.
A dark cavernous void.
It’s like the human has been removed but nothing has replaced it and I’m just a shell.
I have been reduced to a whisper. A whimper. A whine.
The pain is the reminder, the crisp and shocking snap of imaginary fingers in my ear as I begin to drift away, that draws me back to myself just in time to feel it ravage me all over again, from the beginning.
Once more, with feeling! Once more, the screaming.
I die, I live, I die again at sunrise. This is my life.
Valhalla
This morning I went to the gym for the first time in like… I don’t know, a month? Something close to that. I struggled, I had to take breaks, I got frustrated with my weakness. At the same time, I was deeply happy to be there again. So grateful.
A couple of weeks ago, at maybe 2 in the morning, I spoke out into the blackness of my bedroom and asked a god I don’t believe in anymore to please let me live. I talked to my grandparents, my ancestors, the angels. I asked them to please let my boys remember me. Please let my brother know how much I treasure him. Forgive me for all the wasted opportunities and chances not taken.
But if possible, please let me live. I have many things to say, love to give, adventures to go on.
I know this all sounds SUPER dramatic but at the time I needed help to stand up. I was losing consciousness over and over, coughing until I choked, my hands and feet were numb. I had no idea what was going to happen. ((Covid sucks a lot, and I just want to say please don’t judge anyone for their decisions regarding it or the pokey poke. It really is life or death for many people.))
I am brave, but I’m not some Viking warrior who welcomes the idea of Valhalla. No, I am not quite that evolved just yet. I like living. I want to live.
So today, after my workout, I cried. The cool down song started and I shoved my face into my towel and just wept with gratitude. I hope to never experience sickness like that again and in the meantime, to say all the things and go on all the adventures so that when my time does come, I will be ready.
TKO
I’m sick.
That’s it, that’s all I was going to write.
…
I’m really sick, though.
For the first time in a long time
I have been laid low.
Like Mickey when he’s on the ground
And Gorgeous George says,
“You’re gonna want to stay down.”
Yeah, I do.
And sleep. I also want to sleep.
At least for now.
I Saw the Wind Today 🍃
I saw the wind today
Dancing on green leaves
It was a mighty, roaring gust
And then a gentle breeze
Tickling delicate petals
And swirling them around
Guiding this one and that one
Gently to the ground
I saw the wind today.
