7

Today is the darkest day.
7 years today that you’ve been gone, and I just miss you more and more. It’s a long, tired sadness.
The first weeks were sharp and life altering- physically sick and hurting, with sensations I can’t describe accurately. Even though you were 23 when you left this earth, it felt like you were my little baby – being torn from my arms. And all I could do was cry, and rage and fight an invisible assailant.
I resigned myself to the fact that you were never coming back but not in any sort of graceful surrender.
Instead it was a disassociation. In fact sometimes I would sit quietly on the front step, with a cigarette, watching the world as though it no longer was a place that I lived. I felt like I had died, and you lived on in the real world. Fleeting moments still tell me that tale.
There were times I couldn’t feel myself. I could feel the wind blowing past me, and through me like the ghost I had become.
There are still days now in which it feels like every day is my last day. Each story I tell is the last story I will tell.
I never felt like that before you died.
And I will never be the same person I was on October 7th 2016 in those last minutes before the police officer arrived.
Forever changed. I hold little joys I create inside me now, decorating the empty room that has emerged there in the way that one decorates a tragedy spot with flowers and teddy bears.
I honour you by living, not because I am brave but because life is the only choice, and because I made you a promise – that I would try to live joyously. I wrote that promise on the page of the book we buried you with.
You, in turn left me a gift – of understanding. I painfully and intimately know how fragile life is, and how there might not be any tomorrow with the people we love. I love more deeply, and I think I show it better now. I have become a much better person than I ever was, even though I hurt more than I ever thought possible.