Abyss/Black Hole

~tw: death, cancer, anxiety, low mood, thanatophobia/death anxiety~

Some nights my head feels like an abyss and my heart like a black hole, and I am balanced precariously on the edge of both.

Yesterday the guy in Boston Tea Party had a smile like Matt. K and I played Monopoly Deal and drank tea and laughed, and we made it okay. But it still happened.

He still happened.

We'll never get to see Matt smiling like Matt again.

This isn't fair.

We were complete before you came, cancer. We were okay before you came, cancer.

It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed

- Gabrielle Zevin

I miss the past.

I miss who we were.

I miss family barbecues when we ran around barefoot; I miss Gambia, and being part of that team, and that life we lead. I miss standing in between the two people I used to call my world, wondering if it would ever get better than this. I miss Lyme Regis, when we were all together, and we were okay.

There is a piece of me missing tonight, except I think that I am the piece missing. I feel more cracks than anything else.

None of this is fair.

Then there is anxiety.

Death anxiety is the morbid, abnormal or persistent fear of one's own mortality. One definition of death anxiety is a "feeling of dread, apprehension or solicitude (anxiety) when one thinks of the process of dying, or ceasing to ‘be’"

-Wikipedia

That's part of it. The feeling of suffocating darkness that I can't get rid of. Questioning everything. I can't get my head around this. I can't think about it. I can't think.

I am an abyss tonight, I am a black hole. And I am scared to let you in. No story began with such a comparison and ended badly.

It is not that I am not happy. I am just bad at letting myself be happy. I am so in love, with her and the world and everything else, but it is so difficult; because how do you love when you are unloveable?

I am trying to let myself be happy, and to let myself accept that maybe it will be okay.

I'm working on it.

I can hear his voice, if I concentrate. How much longer? One day I won't be able to hear his voice at all.

One day, none of us will be here.

I just really want to be held.

There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass- if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.

- Jodi Picoult