Ten Years Now

I remember waking up on the morning of August 5, 2009, completely unaware, utterly ignorant to what would be waiting for me when I logged on to the computer that morning. I remember how when I clicked that icon and read that message. I remember how it felt like my heart stopped and started racing at the same moment.

I know that isn't how the heart works, I know it can't stop and speed up at the same moment. But that was what it felt like. Some days, it still feels that way when the memory overtakes me, when the reminders find a way to creep in when my guard is down.

Most days, I hate to say, I don't remember, I don't think about it. I hate saying that because it feels like it diminishes his memory, it feels like it discredits the pain his family must still feel, even after these years. I don't want to do that, but I can't write their experience because as the blog is titled, this is me, this is my story. These are my feelings and experiences, and I am the sole proprietor of those feelings and emotions.

It's still crazy to me, how I didn't find out for almost 2 days that he was gone from this world and it's still crazy to me how it's been all this time. Ten years. 3650 days, 87600 hours. It's such a crazy thing in the grand scheme of things, and even years from now, when the amount of time he's been gone will outnumber the amount of time he was here.

I always sit down with these flowery ideas of how to write these kinds of things and then my fingers start typing and emotion, pure, raw emotion just flows out of me and the flowers are trampled and I'm left sitting here rereading what I wrote after time has gone by and it's like looking at two sides of a mirror, one side is back in the moment when it was written, the feelings wash over me and sometimes I feel like I'm drowning, then on the opposite side, I reread past posts and all I can think is "This person was wrecked, she was devastated and adrift in this toiling sea of emotion, someone please throw her a life preserver."

I read over the birthday posts, the I miss you posts and I shake my head. I can't write those things, I can't write them and let the whole world feast on my grief, can't share those pieces with people. I share them here, because I know that hardly anyone, probably no one, reads this. I write this for myself, so I can one day look back when my memory has faded away and read this and hopefully remember.

I just can't believe it's been ten years, and everything that he's missed, all the things he didn't get to see, life he didn't get to live.