If I Had Wings I'd Leave The Ground

I did really well for four days. On Monday I got on a airplane and traveled to Montreal and I did a lot of stuff. I got to visit with a good friend and eat lots of amazing food. We drank too much beer. I also did a ton of work and everything was really extremely good for four days.

For four solid days I only cried one time, I read most of a book, watched movies and reveled in being outside of my own reality for a while. I can stop being me for a while, or the version of me that lives a real life. I can be someone else, someone I didn't become, Or a version of me that doesn't get out of the box very often perhaps.

It was good to get away. It was hard on my family for me not to be here as always. It wasn't an easy trip as some of what I had to do wasn't great. But it was good to get away.

Then I came home.

And my mom was still dead.

I'm not special. My grief is not special. It's not unique in any way except it's mine and it's unfathomable in it's depth and it's complete devastation of how I feel. 100 times a day I think of something I want to tell my mom because my mom always at the very least pretended to be interested in the things I had to say. When the baths have been given and I settle down for a cold drink after doing whatever, I would call my mom. Now I pick up my phone and look at it. It's a well of silence. Empty space in the universe which once contained someone who loved me so completely and unconditionally, even when I started wearing red lipstick that she thought was only appropriate for streetwalkers and old women.

I want to remember every minute of the past 46 years and put them on film and watch them over and over, remembering every moment when my mom was awesome or not awesome, just the moments that my mom WAS.

Except that if I do that, I'm going to stop living my own life, the one she gave me.

I don't know how to break out of this mourning. This is why people wear black and cover mirrors and shit. Because that is how this feels. Dark, non-reflective and unending, it's without question the worst thing that ever happened to me. But it didn't happen to me. It happened to my mom. I am a by stander to the event and my grief is some by product I can't understand or control.

I start crying at dinner. I sit on the sofa and cry for no reason. I wake up in the night and cry.

Well there is a reason. My mother is dead. That's the reason.

Maybe I should go into mourning. Wear black. Condemn myself to being unhappy for a year. Maybe then after a year of self imposed misery I'd come out of it gladly. Maybe then I could sustain happy for more than four days.

I could stop crying at the dinner table, perhaps.

I am pretty sure that would go into the WIN category for everyone.

Until then, apologies in advance. I'm sorry, I really can't help it.




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