'You seem to be so at peace now.' That's what a friend of mine who hadn't seem me in some time told me today and it really struck me. Primarily because I hadn't realized how far removed I am from my dark ages. But since this talk with a friend I've started thinking about when I...well, when I grew up I guess. Or at least when I was finally able to put most of the stuff that haunted me away.
I don't take many naps but I remember falling asleep one rainy afternoon earlier this year and having a dream that shook me to my core. It was so vivid and so real that when I woke up I was terrified that it hadn't just been a dream. Oddly, in the dream I was also sleeping but then suddenly I was hovering over my own body and looking down at myself. Somehow I knew that I was dead (in the dream, obviously) and I could feel that loneliness and emptiness and sadness that must come with realizing it's all over. I felt so cold. When I woke up the first thing on my mind was my deceased girlfriend and I couldn't stop myself from thinking that she went through that when she left (I still can't say the 'd' word in reference to her). She went through that horrible moment and that just completely gutted me. But as awful as that experience and realization was, I think it's what started my healing on this subject.
It took me a long time to visit my girlfriend's grave for the first time. I missed the funeral because I was, well, in a coma but it never really bothered me that I didn't get to go. I've thought many times over the years about what I would've said at the funeral but I don't think I would've been able to handle saying anything at all. There's nothing I would have wanted the mourners to know about her that they already didn't. I think death is much less traumatic for all involved, in a way, if you know it's coming because you get the chance to say what you need to say. You get the chance to say goodbye, which is something a sudden, traumatic death does not give you the opportunity to do. That bothered me for a long time that I didn't get to say goodbye to her in any form. I had nightmares for a long time about her and about what her last moments must have been like. I felt tremendous guilt for not being there, mistakenly convincing myself that I could have changed something if I had been there. I think part of me felt like I deserved to feel bad. We had all these plans and this whole life we were gonna live out together and it was all just suddenly gone. We were young and naive so we were all about being together 'forever' and I didn't realize what a curse that word was until a few years ago. It was like I was stuck in our forever, but not at all the way we had planned it to be. It didn't help that we'd both had car accidents, yet I survived and she didn't. I struggled with why I was left behind and what I was supposed to do with my 'second chance'. I didn't see my second chance as a good thing for a very long time. The bitter end contaminated the millions of good memories we'd made together and I couldn't shake the nightmares.
I used to think that falling in love again would be the answer to my grief and anger so I kept looking for it in all the wrong places. I went from meaningless relationship to meaningless relationship in an attempt to fill the void and end the loneliness. When that didn't work, I upped the dosage of the various pills I was on due to my accident related injuries. If I couldn't be happy, I may as well be numb. It wasn't until I feel in love again for real that I realized nothing saves you from that situation. I spent years trying to fill a void that was never meant to be filled. Nothing will ever fill that void, it only shrinks some. And I can live with that. I've also learned that it never gets easy and you never get over it. You carry it with you for the rest of your days. And when you do fall in love it only makes things more complicated. I know the kind of relationship we had was rare, it's not something that comes along everyday and it may not come around for me again, but I can deal. I was lucky to get one shot at it. Whoever I end up with will understand that I'll always love you on some level but that she doesn't need to try and compare to you.
I wrote like a man possessed for months following her death, filling up all kinds of notebooks with banter and bad drawings. Ever since I was a kid I've written things down to try and understand them and get past them. I write whenever I'm inspired to, it's such a part of me now. I write stuff down on napkins in restaurants, I have notebooks in every room of my house, I use my cell phone to put down notes so I can expand on them later. I've written less and less the past few month and at first I thought that was a bad thing. But now that I've had time to process it, I think I just have less to write about. The nightmares are few and far between, the old habits are all being kept in check and I feel better than I have in years. I don't know if I can go so far as to say I'm content, that's something I've never been in my entire life. But I guess at peace is a good way to put it for now.
