Welcome Back, Grief.

Well, I guess I’m done suppressing. Grief came crashing down on me again, reducing me to a puddle of incoherent, quivering jello.

My vacation from grief was a nice, much needed one which I enjoyed for its duration, but tonight I had to fall. Everything got to be too much.

I spent about forty minutes this afternoon scrolling through personal ads, looking at pictures of men whom I can never imagine sitting across from me. Nobody looked like Chris. Nobody is Chris.

I don’t want somebody new but if I want somebody at all, I have to get used to the idea that he will be new, different, not at all like Chris. We won’t meet the same way. We won’t be the same way. He won’t love me the same way. We won’t go to the same places or do the same things or talk to each other the same way.

I don’t want to try. I just want it to happen. How can I be ready when I can’t even stop crying?

I wish I got to see how Chris and I would have turned out together.

I am aware that I sound like a broken record. The broken part is right. I am broken. I wish I had something new to say, but the truth is that the same thoughts penetrate my consiousness every moment of every day of every week.

I miss him. I want him back. I want him well. I want him to have never gotten cancer. I want us to have the chance to put it all back together on the east coast the way that we planned. I want us to be as happy as we were that first week we arrived back in Boston. I want to still watch “The Sopranos” with him and I want to come home to him cooking dinner for us. I want to wake up knowing that I have to be quiet for a couple of hours so he can enjoy the morning paper, even though I’m busting at the seams to talk to him.

What we had was special. It was close. Warm. Trusting. A true partnership.

I must not be ready, yet.