Remember all those years ago when the band Staind came out with a song called “It’s Been Awhile” and people played it obsessively and then started hating it with the same aplomb? I still play it sometimes. Because sometimes it’s been awhile since I’ve been myself or checked in on this blog or smiled or just felt ok. It’s been awhile.
My second Dad died back in March.
His death uncorked a bloated bottle of putrid shit deep in my chest and the last six or so months have been a blur of not ok, maybe ok, kinda ok, really not ok, really REALLY not ok, maybe ok today, maybe never ok again, and the new normal is hoping for the kind of ok that I used to be. Ok?
I feel like I’ve been saying for the last decade of my life, almost every month: Grief is a motherfucker. When I think about Charma and June and my Dad and both of my Grandpas and my Uncle and my second Dad and layoffs at work and just…all the shit, when I line it all up like that I might have a tiny pinprick of realization that I have been in a constant state of some kind of loss for a decade now. Now, now, now that doesn’t negate any of my happy places at all – because I’ve had them, a LOT of them – but the loss is a slow, humming, melodic lo-fi beat ready to pound out a rhythm with your breathing if you let the happy music fade into the background.
I know how to grieve. I’ve been doing it for over a decade. I’m just tired of doing it.
I took up guitar again after way too many years away and I think my first intention was to just get out some of the feelings by focusing on how bloody my fingertips could get as I strummed and banged and made horrible sounds. Still, Zach Bryan is saving me and lessons with Jamie are saving me and free Youtube guitar lessons are saving me and I guess…at the end of the day…*I* am saving me too.
I had a burst back in May and April and June and read 70+ books in that 90-day span. I escaped into the world of fairy smut and dragon porn and fantasies of women being their own hero and men being sensitive and wonderful and people not being awful and even when they WERE awful, getting their just desserts in the form of forced loneliness or death at the hands of an angry dragon or punishment in a far away prison. I read bad books, really bad books, a few really good books, and long, LONG stories that just took me out of my life for hours at a time. JD was annoyed with me pretty constantly as I ghosted around the house with my giant Apple headphones and didn’t speak for days at a time. Things didn’t just fall through the cracks, I flat out ignored anything but my most basic needs: sleeping, eating sometimes, showering, showing up to work, and going through the motions. She was hurt, thinking I was pulling away from her and I tried tried tried to explain that I was running on empty, coasting into the station on fumes, nothing to give, nothing to feel, nothing nothing nothing and that I was just trying to survive whatever it was I was trying to survive. Hard to tell someone “it’s not about you” when you don’t have any explanation for what it IS actually about. Still, here it is four months later and I’m here so it looks like I am still surviving.
Pinprick of light in my life these days. Secret happy place where I can go in my head and heart and feel ok. Just for me. Just for the me who is raw and too tired to pretend to be ok. Just for the me that wants to heal myself in the way that I know how to do. Mine to covet like one of those red sequins I held in my grubby palm after that car banged into me when I was four. Mine like those nights in bed when the world was asleep and I’d think of “anywhere but here”. Mine like plans and hopes and dreams and desires that I don’t even write down for fear of losing them. Mine to feel. Mine to fear. Mine to just exist with. Mine to believe in. And I do, in spite of everything. And in spite of myself.
Music is bringing up choir for their last song of this protracted little sermon on navel-gazing: “The Night We Met” by Lord Huron.
Lyrics:
I am not the only traveler
Who has not repaid his debt
I’ve been searching for a trail to follow again
Take me back to the night we met
And then I can tell myself
What the hell I’m supposed to do
And then I can tell myself
Not to ride along with you
I had all and then most of you
Some and now none of you
Take me back to the night we met
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do
Haunted by the ghost of you
Oh, take me back to the night we met
When the night was full of terrors
And your eyes were filled with tears
When you had not touched me yet
Oh, take me back to the night we met
I had all and then most of you
Some and now none of you
Take me back to the night we met
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do
Haunted by the ghost of you
Take me back to the night we met
Sometimes…ok, almost always…when I hear those lyrics, it doesn’t evoke images of lost love with another person like I think it’s supposed to. It’s a reminder to the me that stopped being me over six months ago:
“I had all and then most of you, some and now none of you”
I don’t know where I read that people reincarnate over and over in their life and that we basically become a hundred different people while we live out our existence. Maybe that song resonates because I miss that girl who was ok all those months ago. Maybe I’m scared that whoever is here now is the new version of ok. Maybe I don’t want to be ok.
Maybe.