To fade

I'd finally talked with Jeff tonight after a long week of what seemed like him pulling away from me. Usually when this happens, it's something I'm doing that pisses him off and he pulls away leaving me feeling directionless, anxious, unfocused, and worried. So I was getting the familiar signals this week, emphasized in long, drawn out silences, meals eaten without a word spoken to one another and long hours spent in separate rooms doing things by ourselves. I realize this might be normal for others but for us, who are so immersed and entwined in each other's worlds, it's nothing if not short of disconcerting. So I'd let it simmer all weekend and finally asked him tonight if I'd done something to piss him off. He sort of looked at me and said he's just sort of lost his way with how to be with me in terms of where I'm at with Mom being gone and finally decided though vibes I was sending out that I was asking to be left alone and given wide berth to chew on whatever I needed. I've never been the most astute of the two of us when it comes to communicating needs and wants back and forth and I've been completely clueless what I've looked like and acted like over these last months. I actually thought I'd been doing well. No cry jags, no laying around and wasting days looking at pale reflections of regret and sadness; I felt like, if not blazing hot trails of meaningful living, I was at least being present and mindful and not laterally drifting. I felt like I was getting along which is the only thing to do, really.

I actually still feel that way. My days are getting...more, if that's an adjective you believe in. The distance given by time changes the sorrow and the uncertainty and the sadness in a strange way. It fades and draws it out into something else that fits into each day and night. It's not so much in front and on top of everything I do and see and think anymore but more behind it all, giving support and solidity. It becomes less emotional and more factual. It is this way and will be this way; go on, now. It's not a wound to be healed, it's an experience that has a long time to get tumbled and rolled over, to be thought about and written about and thought about more.

I've been waiting to get here for some time though it's not where or what I thought it would be. I gave up trying to figure out the whole big map of this process and have just been sort of meandering along, taking in the good days and bad days and hoping the days would come when it wasn't such a sharp stake to the heart. I had actually started to believe that had I been religious, the ecstasy of the Spirit might turn it all around and I'd be full of gladness and earnest bliss in her heavenly reward. Then I started thinking that's a huge load and was glad I wasn't wallowing in all that. I'd come to a good place with the afterwards for my Mom well before she died and it wasn't about self-delusion, it was about knowing enough to not know anything and not to worry over it.

So time fades the edges of it in a very personal way, at least for me. My days go on as they have before but what I told Jeff, as he stood there watching me, was that I needed him closer to me if anything. I need the regular days of our lives to keep on moving in predictable paths so that when I need to sit back and just watch, I know where the ride is going. It's this regularity that would drive some crazy, but to feel the regular pulse of our lives helps me know the days move on with me in them, present.