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(?)