Bifurcation

Today I tried to explain what this grief is doing to me...

The sadness has no floor. I keep waiting to hit bottom and there isn't one. Just more of it, further down, every time I think I've found the end of it. Unbearable more often than not. That's the honest word for it. Not sad. Not hard. Unbearable.

I told someone today that I'm afraid of becoming the mask. Years of work... intensive psychotherapy... real progress toward self knowledge, toward being as close to authentic as I know how to be... and now I have to split myself in half again just to function. Show up. Handle what needs handling. Wear the face that can do that in front of people who are counting on me.

I was afraid that face was going to be the only one left. That the man underneath it, the one I spent years becoming, died with Ryan too.

But I don't think that's it. Not exactly. The mask is load bearing right now. Not fake. Necessary. A door held shut against something too big to let through when I'm at work, or with people who need me steady.

That's different from the mask becoming who I am. One is a tool I pick up and put down. The other would be a trap. I have to keep telling the difference apart, on purpose, or I lose track of it.

The real me isn't gone. He's just down to a couple of rooms where it's still safe to show up.

I have three rooms at the moment. Robin and Pam, mostly by text, because text gives me something speaking doesn't... control. Time to shape it. A way to get the worst of it out without my voice giving out in the middle of it.

And my therapist, once a week, where I say things out loud on purpose. Not everything. I choke up before I get to the hardest parts sometimes. But I choose them anyway, because if I only get a few sentences out before it closes my throat, I want those to be the ones that matter.

I have been feeling like not finishing the sentence meant I was failing at this. Failing at grieving right, whatever that means. I don't think I feel like that anymore. The crying is still communication. She hears it whether or not the words make it out whole. Maybe she hears more that way, not less.

I don't have the answer for the bottomless part. I don't think there is one. I'm not trying to accept that he's gone... I don't think I'm supposed to yet, this early.

My mind already knows it. That happened the moment I got the news, whether I wanted it to or not. My heart hasn't caught up and may not for a long, long time. Most days now, survival just means living in that gap. Not closing it. Just tolerating the distance between what I know and what I can't yet feel. In fact, survival may not be the right word. Survival implies fight. Fight is something I simply do not have. The correct word is existence, at least for now and in the foreseeable future.

Three rooms isn't nothing. Some days it feels like nothing, like three rooms in an empty house. But it's more than it feels like. It's proof the door still opens for someone.

Although it feels like it, the man in there hasn't forgotten how to speak, even when the words come out broken, even when they don't come out at all.

I'm still here. Still saying it, however it comes out. Still choosing the worst parts first, on purpose, because he's worth saying out loud, even when it costs everything I have to get through the sentence.