The Dinner Party

Tonight, a friend of mine from my former place of employment hosted a dinner party which she invited me and 4 other former co-workers to. There were seven of us total.

There were two couples among us, one of them being the hostess and her husband. I couldn’t help observing them interact throughout the evening. I wasn’t necessarily deliberately noticing the similarities between them and me and Chris. My brain was doing it automatically.

When LIsa ran her hand over Peter’s shaved head, down the back of his neck and finally down his right shoulder, I was sucked into a vacuum in which I remembered doing exactly that to my Chris. I loved making physical contact with him. I loved making him feel loved.

When dinner was served and it was reavealed that Paul did most of the cooking, my heart ached for Chris. He used to do most of our cooking. Paul and Allison were so wonderful together and reminded me very much of myself and Chris. He cooks. She works. They’re both graphic artists. They travel. They like to try new restaurants.

Have I been living in a vaccuum? Is this the way :most healthy relationships are? I have been convinced that Chris and I were the only two people in the world who really knew how to be wonderful to each other. Maybe that’s because I had never had a man be wonderful to me before I met him. Watching these couples interact gave me confidence that there might be another really nice guy out there somewhere. If there are at least three that I can count, maybe there are another hundred that I’m currently unaware of.

I felt like crying a couple of times over the course of the evening. I swallowed it and jumped back into the conversation telling myself that it wasn’t the time or the place.

I still want to introduce my Chris to my friends that never got to meet him. Everybody really would have loved him. Everybody always did. He would have come to this party with me tonight and he really would have loved Allison’s husband, Paul because he’s intellectual. Chris was too. I was very proud of that.

Hanging out with couples is difficult for me. It’s tough to see what I once had that I no longer have. I really want everyone I meet to have known Chris, but that’s just not possible.

I’m tired ot time being weird. When will it all iron out? I can’t believe I have been gone from Filene’s for a year and four months. Time has been strange since Chris died. There’s a buffer surrounding it that is similar to the buffer of shock that protected me in the first three or four months.

I’m terrified of the passing time but powerless to stop it. I’m afraid that if I don’t deal with time and get to the bottom of why it scares me so much, I’m going to feel this fog like protedtor for the rest of my life. Calendars are difficult for me, which is strange seeing that I manage the calendars of three busy executives every single day. If I have to go back in their calendars to see what happened last year or to look for information for a meeting that took place before Chris died, I begin to sweat, my heart beats faster and harder and breathing is difficult. Looking back in a calendar, any calendar, only reminds me of how long it has been since my life got turned upside down.