Full Stop

It is fall. I know it because it is steadily cooler and the rain keeps coming.

I had to pick up smoking, again. I have to have a drink before bed so that I can sleep without my dead baby's image on loop. I spend too much time thinking that I can change the past.

Music piped directly to my brain is the only thing keeping me from slipping away during the day.

I used to love the fall. I loved the fake winter that Houston represents.

I used to love Halloween.

Soon she will be dead longer than she was alive.

Months of going through the motions of normal life doesn't have me prepared for this. It is crushing. It is grief, new and raw, as though I am stuck on December 13th for the rest of my life.

I went away for a weekend trip to Luling. It helped, for two weeks. I was hoping that the peace and ability to face myself would carry me on through the rest of the year. I was wrong.

Lately it feels like I am wrong all of the time. I try things, some new and some old, and they aren't doing what they are supposed to. I have unrealistic expectations.

My emotions are in chaos. I spent three hours petting the lock of hair I trimmed from her head on Mother's Day. We taped it in to my card last year. It was a stroke of genius, because I don't have anything of her, now. Her smell is gone from her toys. I know, I tried. I smelled every toy and blanket.

Perhaps grief is supposed to be this way. Maybe this is just part of it, the part where I can't help but be batshitcrazy with grief.

So, there are gaps. I don't write. I don't make phone calls. I don't want to spread this around. There is a time and a place for this kind of painful melodrama.