Last night…

I am sitting with ghosts tonight. I’m so damned lonely I can hardly breathe. I fear this is what the future holds, night after night of ghosts and loneliness. I feel defeated. I have no stuffing.

I’m trying to get away from writing about grief all the time but tonight, sitting with ghosts, grief is all I’ve got. These days I find myself reaching for words like a smoker reaches for cigarettes, they calm me, they keep me company. When I’m alone words are my friends, they help me cope.

I want to tell the ghosts to move over, they are crowding my thoughts and directing the words. They are they reason grief is smothering me tonight. But I don’t want them to leave, I’m actually glad to see them.

I’ve had a couple of almost grief free days, days where I felt almost okay, and that in turn made me feel really bad. I feel guilty when I don’t feel bad enough. I feel broken because I have minutes of not being broken. How sad is sad enough?

And then the tsunami hit – a wall of grief so strong it knocked me flat.

I was expecting good days and bad but I wasn’t expecting this. I wasn’t expecting to feel bad that I was having a good day, or good when a bad day showed up. I wasn’t expecting the relief of knowing I was still heartbroken, that I hadn’t forgotten. The reminder that what I lost was huge and my life will never be the same somehow makes me feel normal.

I’m on a complicated journey and unsure of the destination. I’m thankful for my ghostly companions and thankful for the words, especially on nights like this. I’ve got to figure out where I’m going and what I’m expecting to find once I get there. Until then I’ve got my ghosts and I’ve got my words – for tonight they have to be enough.