#217

I've lived, quite happily, with my ghosts for the last eight months. Grief is comfortable, after a while. A comfort blanket of misery that you can take everywhere with you. I couldn't or wouldn't let it stop me working but I allowed it to extend cold, dead, clammy fingers into all other aspects of my life. It became convenient to nest in my sadness, to spend ninety hours a week working and the remaining hours alone, talking to ghosts. I could have made more of an effort, months ago, to pick myself up and dust off the darkness, little by little. But I didn't. I didn't want them to leave. A part of me loathes the intrusive memories, the nightmares, despises the shock of seeing her face in a crowd, of ironing a shirt and discovering the faded pink heart she stitched inside the cuff. The rest of me clings desperately to those small moments of shock which leave me standing, stricken, remembering her. After all, without those...what are they? If I forget, then what? What's left? 

 

I argue with the rational part of myself that thinks, repeatedly, perhaps now - perhaps it is time. I fight fiercely with that side of me; I gave up their ashes! I gave up her things! I gave in to her family, their graves aren't even in this country! I gave up my job, our house! Isn't that enough? What more am I meant to do? And so I curled, safe and sad inside my nest of grief. And there I stayed. People tried to tempt me out, to drag me out, to pull the words from me, and force my sadness into the light. As though it would crumble in the face of their happy little lives. But it doesn't work like that. I gave up those things because it was easier. Because if I gave up all the things that reminded me of them being gone, then I was free to live with my ghosts. 

 

I'm drawing myself out slowly now and trying to find people I can bear to have near me. People who didn't know her, and people who did, some of them. I've never particularly liked people, or really understood most people, which makes it even more important, somehow, for me to find people I can bear. I still miss them, daily, hourly, sometimes minute by minute. I still have nightmares. I still get intrusive memories. I still see her face in crowds. I still haven't held my friend's three month old daughter, and I still haven't returned my mother in law's calls. I still work ninety hour weeks. I still talk to my wife. I still have that awful, hollow, clenching pain in my chest. But I've talked to an actual living person every day for two months, returned some calls from old friends, been outside more, drunk less, and tried a little harder. I'm not going to suddenly forget her because I put down the bottle and go sit in the garden.

And tonight? Tonight I had a date. A third date. Which I barely even thought about because I was so tied up in work, and so thrilled that everything went smoothly. So no guilt. Well, a little, when the extremely odd thought that my dead wife would have liked him. Which isn't a thought I can deal with, it's one that I keep boxed in the corner of my mind. Things are getting better, I suppose, which brings new guilt, new sadness, and correspondingly little happiness. Which makes it hard to see what all this was for.