This is Not How It Was Supposed to Be

It's been a year and a half since you died and over two years since our world was fractured and shaken to its core.

And there is not a single day that slips away unnoticed or an afternoon that fades into the night without loneliness for what has passed.  

There are words that fit into pieces missing, but never that complete the puzzle.  Phrases and expressions, long sighs, and streaming tears that come when least expected are spread thin along the edges.  Moments stick like worn tape on a weathered door and leave memories that tug at the same places inside. 

We step lightly forward because the world moves beneath us, but I would gladly tread backward if I could.  And the stubborn thoughts persist, despite their naivety.  "This is not how it was supposed to be" echoes like it did on that Saturday in November when the scenery stood rigid, juxtaposed with the shattering and swirling of my world inside.  

I am angry all the time with what was taken from me before I ever really knew that it could even be taken at all.  I am angry at myself for believing that I was ever promised otherwise.  And I am so unbearably heartbroken at the hole that cannot be filled, at the fissure that separates what was and could have been with the hollow shell of what is. 

There have been so many days on which I have sat down to write, to put my memory quilt together, to go through the letters and emails I have untouched in folders and stored away in boxes.  And on each of those days I've stopped before I could even begin.  Because this is not how it was supposed to be.  I keep expecting to be down the road somewhere, in this place I thought I'd be by now; the space where that thought no longer paralyzes everything inside of me.  And so I sit with it still, day in and day out.  I sit with the disbelief that you are gone and the angry reminder that what is left does not ever feel enough.     

At the end of the day I close my eyes and know that what you taught me, above all of this, will sustain me through this and more.  I hold tight to the memories I have of you in hard times, when all I wanted was for you to find your smile again.  And I remember how you told me time and again, "this too shall pass" and that "sometimes in life we just have to be sad for a while"...