The Day After

This is a continuation of sorts of The Day Joy Left My Life. I don’t like it, but I suppose that I’ll just keep working on it.

I am in hell. The pain I feel is indescribable. It is dull, it is sharp, it is rough, it is brutally cold. It is all I can do not to sit here and wallow in the emptiness. I try not to beat myself up. I try not to assign blame. I try and I fail. Failure is all I can see. Everywhere I look are signs that my life is not the life I want to be living. Everywhere I look I find evidence of someone else’s life. I used to know that person. I used to be that person, or so I think. That was back when I thought that I was happy.

The person who occupied that body is dead. I can’t say when they died, but I know that they did. That is assuming that they ever were really alive. And that is a big question. Were they really alive. Did they really live or were they just kind of getting by.

I am afraid to really ask myself that question. Afraid to admit that maybe I settled. Maybe I took the path of least resistance. The fear is that the answer is yes. The fear is that I am becoming what I hate. The fear is that now that I have known what it means to be alive I will never do so again.

You are/were my air. Every morning I woke up knowing that my best friend would be there. It didn’t matter what we did. I just liked spending time with you. It was a more mature and more complete love than anything I had ever known. And that makes its absence all the more palpable. That makes the loss more devastating because I know that if I can’t have that love, if I can’t be that person I can’t let myself feel.

Already I am working on building a wall. Already the defenses are being erected. I can’t let myself feel so much pain. I can’t stand to feel like such a miserable fool. I can’t let the memories of what we had punish me. It sickens me.

It sickens me to sound like a drama queen. It sickens me to feel. It sickens me to think of not feeling. But I can’t live like this. I can’t stand it. I cannot take the constant ache. The punishment is too great. If you were here I could. If I had some hope I could find the strength.

Want to know what really hurts? It is the idea that one day I might reach a place where the memory of you doesn’t cause me to double over in pain. It is the thought that one day it won’t hurt at all and I’ll wonder why it ever bothered me at all. I’ll scratch my head and think that it must have been nothing more than a bad dream.

Love deserves more than that.

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