The Missing You

The Missing You

The missing you is sorrow. The worst kind of sorrow you get. Between agony and misery, lies the slightest hope that set up when someone in passing told you “It does get better, just give it a year”. So, you do the math and you add up the days that have already passed, not realizing the nights you would spend remembering their laugh and already panicking about the day you'll maybe forget it, you decide you can maybe tough out the year before your heart brakes entirely in half.  God, you’re a monster, how could you spend a lifetime with someone and worry you may not remember their goddam laugh?    

But if we are telling the truth, that laugh haunts you.  It lingers in your ears when you are almost falling asleep until suddenly you find yourself laying there- listening intently and staring at the ceiling and thinking, my God, what I would do to hear that sound one more time… or to hear you say my name.  “Hey Coli”. The missing you part has absolutely been the worst.

The missing you, is the part past the trauma of losing you.  I think that’s what people don’t fully get sometimes.  People don’t always get that, all these sad stories of suffering, the unfair choices people are pulled into… the gut-wrenching loss of function and purpose… that’s all your stuck with for a while after they go.  You’re stuck with trying to walk your way around how what just went down, actually happened, and at the same time functioning through the lives that never stopped living. It's a brutal dance of shock and fate… one that most of us will handle during our lifetimes, and most likely more than once.  

The missing you, that part happens once you step through the fire.  It’s a bit of a lie, because for a brief second you mistake it for relief.  It’s a cunning beast, the missing you.  It sits and waits until your chest loosens a bit, when you start to smile a little bigger… You start to breathe a bit deeper. It sneaks up and in.  For me it came with the Spring, which is kind of funny because I guess I thought it may feel more like a fresh start than a heavy fog.  I was wrong.  The sun got brighter and warmer, and I was suddenly and vividly aware of how absent she was in those moments.  When the sun hits my face and I feel warmth and I think of summer and long walks, the pain comes when none of it feels as good as it did before.  Nothing feels the same. I can’t help but say out loud, “I hate the world without you in it”.  Sometimes… I even mean it.

It’s in the quietness where their voice would be.  The phone calls you don’t make on the way home.  The jokes that they would have loved but that only you laugh at.  The calls you never received when you started your new job. It’s in these non-moments.  In the tiny, so very tiny split seconds where your mind lets you know you’re never going to enjoy those moments again with your person on this earth.  It’s a quick flash, a stabbing pain in your heart… and then, it’s over as quickly as it started.  Because you’re starting to get good at stuffing the hurt back in and in fact, you're maybe even a bit numb.  You wince and even it out almost in the same second.

The missing you part, has been the worst.  It’s the slow and steady realization that things have in-fact, been altered in the world.  It’s the avoiding things you used to love because they remind you of them. It’s the pain you feel in your chest when you hear a song, smell a smell, and drive by their favorite place.  The missing you part, it’s a forever thing.  Thank God we can’t feel it all at once.  Instead, we grapple with this new life, this new way forward, one day at a time.  My guess is that one day, maybe soon- maybe not, we maybe feel a bit right again.  We find a way to stop the throbbing.  Or maybe time tricks us into thinking we’ve healed when we really only adjust to the ache.

The missing you has started to leave its mark.  Navigating “this”, wasn’t supposed to have been done without you.  But here we are.  And we keep showing up and trying.  Even when it’s really hard.  Despite our fears and our woes.  Despite our pain and suffering.  We show up.  

This is how we go through it guys.  Even when the missing you makes it hard to know what’s real anymore.  We take one step at a time, and we keep going.