Maybe I’m remembering this all wrong. Maybe I’m not the
person I think I am. I have grasped tightly to the label “widow” as its
definition most closely mirrors how I view myself, but is that even wrong? Do I
even deserve that? I would have done anything for you, Ryan. We talked about
this and I was setting everything up to make that happen because it was best
for you – so it was necessary for us.
The abandonment by those around me, the ones who promised
when no promise was requested, the ones who never made a promise to begin with,
the ones you expected by default to stay and the ones you truly felt would…have
they left because I carry a tag they think I do not deserve? Have they made the
connections in the string of events, cast their blame, and turned their backs on
me because of it? I hate them for doing that but I understand that decision,
because I do carry the blame. I have chosen, months later now, to learn from
the regrets but am nowhere near forgiveness for the guilt. The bits and pieces
that are separated into those 2 piles are very well defined now; I am rational
at least, enough to see that. Regrets would not have changed the outcome, they
would have simply provided better memories to me, the survivor, and maybe for
my Love, though not survived. The horrible details that are placed in the guilt
pile are the ones which undoubtedly would have kept him here by my side. I do
not wish for them to be in that pile, I do not choose them to be. They simply
are. Perhaps then, to others, I am a person so unloveable and painful to be around
that removing me entirely is a rational decision I just cannot see for myself.
Perhaps I an addict to grief and unwilling to admit it.
Perhaps I an addict to grief and unwilling to admit it.
I know my brain is warped. In a bizarre way it’s
almost as if I can feel that I am not just
chemically but structurally different. Feeling physiologically incapable of tasks that you were otherwise competent to
perform is so incredibly frustrating.
I want Ryan back. I also want my brain back. I don’t need a
diagnosis because I already recognize this environment that I am residing in –
one so atypical for me. I sit back as a casual observer wondering who this
person is with an obvious aphasia, with anxiety, the woman who cannot retain
information, who cannot carry conversations on with multiple people at a time
because the conversations in her head cannot be kept separate from those
flowing from her lips. Who is that person? This woman who observes herself
externally…she studied this, this was her passion, the study of neurobiology
put a smile on her face and woke her up for years on early mornings and kept
her locked in a dark room late at night to better understand this phenomenal
structure that is the mammalian brain.
That woman is now trapped by a mind she cannot escape, by a
brain that attacks her when she least expects. Her decisions over the last 7
months and 15 days have not always been logical or appropriate, though she
extends to herself forgiveness for those. But how do you continue to wake up
when waking up entails constantly fighting yourself to hit a level best
described as functional? If struggling for that is the best I’ve got, and if that
alone exhausts me, how will I ever expect to hit a plane dubbed successful
again? Why, Brain, why are you attacking me? Why, Body, are you so slow to
recover and so quick to break down? I am not wallowing, I am fucking trying!
