The Door at the Top of the Stairs

 This Week, the week of October first, to October seventh was a week that was coming no matter what.  Like a train that comes screaming down the tracks and shakes the tresses of the bridge across the gorge in one of those old school train robber movies, I tried to come up with ways to blow up the track, to be able to push the plunger of some weird quantum mechanics dynamite set up that would in one sweet chaotic destructive moment, somehow make the past five months an alternate reality that you only read about in stories, some weird Bedford Falls moment when suddenly things shift back to the way the worlds supposed to be.  But there is no dynamite, no quantum physics equation that will fix things.

There's a door in our house, it's right at the top of the stairs.  There's a sticker on the door, Baby Yoda, she never would call him by his name, she hated that they named him so she just called him Baby Yoda.  This door has been only been opened five times in the past five months, at least by me.  I have opened this door and I have gone in and I have stood and looked at the things that are exactly how they were five months ago.  One of those times I just sat on the floor feeling this empty hole that I tip over into and find a seemingly bottomless pit of grief.  

In five months I have found that doing the next thing is the only thing you can do really.  That filling time with work and activities and all the things that don't always matter but that distract is the only way to survive, and then I walk up the steps and I see that door and there are times that I actually reach for the handle just to go in and smell her and I can't.  I go into my room and shut the door and will all of it away.

I think one of the most disconcerting things is recognizing how much I've been rewired.  Emotionally and physically, even in some respects spiritually.  I know that Josie wouldn't have wanted that but it just happened.  Sometimes I feel like I'm watching myself, some third person perspective thing, and I keep wanting to be able to push the left analog stick to the right or left and press b and dodge but the controllers batteries are low and so I just keep barreling through and I know it's not what I used to be, not how I used to do it and sometimes I scream at myself to stop but it's of no use. The re-wiring did take place and things that used to be just aren't. 

Ask anyone that's gone through this and they will all tell you there's really no way to explain it and no way for anyone to understand it till it happens, and no one wants it to happen.  It reminds me of being told what it was going to feel like when I started to sit for the artwork that's almost finished on my arm.  There's really no way to explain what it feels like to be jabbed with tiny needles over and over and over again you just have to experience it to understand.  The parallels are uncanny both things leave permanent reminders.  The tiny needles forever inking into the only canvas that's truly personal, the really bad thing scaring your heart and soul in ways that can only be healed when you or I step into that next part of life, the real part where there can be no more pain, no more sorrow and no more tears.  Even then I have to wonder if the questions will remain if there will be that part of me that wants to go up and just say,  why didn't you have my back on May 16th?  Why didn't you do something?  

The door is closed now. It's actually tied shut because our house is old and all the doors don't really latch and stay closed without a bit of extra help.  I get so many things that used to just make no sense or seem silly...I get why people don't change the room, I understand why they keep a phone and a phone line even though it won't ever be answered again.  It's because all of us in this really messed up space that should never be have this strange delusion that at some point we will wake up.  That it's all a bad dream and that all those things will be needed again, that the text will be answered or the guess what I drew will come to you, and so we keep these things because they are the things that tether us to our child, our child that we love, our child that should not be gone at the age of 9 because that's not how its supposed to be.

Thursday she would have been 10, double digits.  She will forever bee my nine year old girl and that while it's an amazing blessing,  is also an amazing curse.  Because it shouldn't have been this way.  It never should be this way.

See you around the blog dear reader.