My Best Enemy and My Worst Friend

Maybe it’s because I’m about to be remarried (more on that when I'm feeling better), or maybe it’s all the extra time on my hands now that I have joined (temporarily, I hope) the ranks of the unemployed, but I have been experiencing my emotions with reckless abandon, these past few days.

Time, you know (if you have been reading this blog from the start), is something I have been running from since Chris fell ill way back in 2003. I haven’t really allowed myself to stop running from quiet moments alone in a very long time. Such moments used to stand for breathing, regrouping, imagining, fostering creativity, and the like. Post Chris’ death, quiet moments fill me with dread, depression, feelings of lack of control, and tears. Now, faced with unemployment and days spent alone at home, job-searching, job training and thinking, I am aware that I need to place a new definition of what it means to be faced with nothing but time. I can’t spend my days crying. I can’t spend each moment overwrought with seven-year-old anxiety. It’s time to make a permanent change, if I can.

There are people from the past I shared with Chris with whom I am still friendly, today. Those people are very, very special people in my life whose presence means a great deal to me. I love them like I loved Chris, and I would love to be able to embrace them without bubbling over with tears in the private moments after we interact.

I don’t want to be the new me, anymore. I want to be the old me, again. When I was the old me, I took time to be alone. I demanded time alone to be with myself, and create my world. It’s hard to keep running. I’m tired, and even though I am an optimistic, happy person in many ways, I am still quite traumatized by Chris’ death, and still angry that he left me, even though I’m in love again…even though I’m in love again.

The great divide is very, very wide. Life is strange when you can’t talk to a person with whom you once shared everything. It’s like a mute person trying to speak. It’s like the scream in your nightmares that never quite makes it past your lips. I can’t tell Chris I love him. I can’t tell him I hate him. I can’t ask him what the name of that Red Sox player was who lost all confidence in his throw, or what it was like to take the bus to Oak Square when he first moved to Boston. We can’t rehash how we felt about moving to Los Angeles, or discuss Ellis Paul’s new single.

In the large scheme, it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m getting busy with new memories, now. I have let go of a lot of things, and there is still much more to let go.

Time is both my best enemy and my worst friend.