Alone

Honestly, I'm not sure how much good it does me to write.  Sometimes I think that this just makes me dwell on things.  Other times... I feel so desperate for something, some kind of observation, maybe, of all of this that there seems to be nothing else to do.  As if typing words on this screen makes me real in a way that nothing else does.  I am here.  I am still here.

Last week was mostly an exercise in excruciating.  The aloneness seemed to drain everything, and I felt all the time this sensation of being an actor on a stage with no audience.  I think that's almost the hardest thing, the feeling that my life, unwitnessed, has no meaning at all.  That I walk through things as if someone were looking at me, and when I lose that feeling, it's like Dumbo without his magic feather, and I fall.

I fell hard.  Friday I was nothing but shattered.

Today... better, a bit, more grounded.  Happier in my skin.  But still.

So much memory.  And I sit here alone, listening to music, trying to work, and it's all surreal.  A year ago... Jonathan, Caitlin, Michael.  Today, me and the cats.  Jonathan happy at college, Caitlin... not my problem, Michael dead.  Michael, dead.  Sometimes that still seems the height of unreal, like when I sat at Tim's last weekend with that pounding in my head.  Michael is dead, and I am still walking around, I am still coasting through my days, I am still alive, I am still sane.  But Michael is dead. 

There is no reality to this life.

I can see, for crystalline sugar-sweet moments, how I might have a life that goes on.  But in between, I think that there's still a reckoning.  Still something that has to happen, still a point where I fall completely apart, when I really admit in a way that I cannot feel right now that I am not all right, that I may never be anything like I was, ever again.