16 years can sound like a lifetime but when speaking about loss it feels like just yesterday. I have never quite known what makes some years easier than others but this year… it’s one of the tough ones. It’s the kind of year that I start to feel the pain about mid-February and it tends to last past March. My hearts reminder that a great loss was felt many years ago. When I think back on this time it’s like I’m watching from a cinematic point of view I watch myself, I watch my life fall apart, watch it crumble right before my eyes. It’s the kind of thing that completely changes you, it shakes your world up so bad that it changes the course you were on. In my case it completely stopped it. For an entire year I quit living. I was like a robot doing the things I needed to stay charged but nothing more. It’s a strange feeling to remember because I was so deep into the loss if feels dark, gloomy, like a dark shadow having a hold of me. Depression. I felt comfortable there, safe and hidden. Hidden from the sad looks on people’s faces, hidden from the annoying “are you, okays” and “it’ll get betters” hidden from the people looking for answers to why I wouldn’t return calls or messages. I had no room left for anyone or anything my entire being was filled with pain and anger… and oh boy the anger that resided in me was large. I would literally scream at God like I had him in my face, I’d tell him all the things he had done wrong by me. I was going toe to toe with God because he took him from me, because he was finally better and he yanked him from me. I loved him, what a lot people don’t know is that I was in love with him. Something that I was never even able to tell him because he was TAKEN from me. Sometimes the shadows claw at my feet trying to drag me back in and I try with all my might to fight them off. I take to writing to gather my thoughts clear my head. I use it as a way to purge everything I hold inside because I’m the happy one, the one that always smiles and is always funny. I love the life that I have now and it’s a work in progress to look back and see what I climbed out of and feel proud instead of guilty. I try to look past the loss and look to what I had before, the many nights we stayed up talking on the phone or chatting online. I look back to the smiles and laughter we shared. To the songs we sang. To the walks home from school and that damn smile that I can still see in my memories. That first year I was terrified of forgetting you, 16 years later I remember you the same. Loss can be an awful thing but if we stick around long enough we still come out on the other side of it. There is no appropriate amount of time to mourn or rules you need to follow to correctly grieve, it’s a process a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to forget someone you love but mourning isn’t trying to forget its holding on to the good memories, the ones that make us smile and sometimes make us cry. It’s taking every day one at a time one foot in front of the other. It’s learning to live with the new circumstance you find yourself in. Living and not dying in life and most importantly losing the guilt of being alive.
 
 
Thank you all who have continued to push me to keep writing and have been waiting for new post for a LONG time I appreciate you never giving up on me. I knew only time would tell to get me back into it and I hope I do continue to write often. I know you will all be the first to know when I do.