Black Boxes Burning Blue in the Nothingness

It was strange to realize that I spend so much time telling PEOPLE my problems. How foolish of me to expect their guidance, their approval.. and I don't want or need it. We are groomed and taught from a young age to have this standard of respect and communication with others. There are layers of respect forced upon us. Respect for parents, friends, family, authority figures, school teachers... you get the idea. I recall hearing something once about loneliness being the human condition; it surely lends to the idea that we were not designed to be alone... it's in our very composition to need another. How tragic. I'm good at being alone, and yet I feel the urge to complain about it, if for nothing more than to contribute to this illusion that I am like everyone else. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the years I have systematically cut people off from my life. It started shortly after the death of my Mother in the summer of 2011. Up until then I had been lulled into this thinking that life was long and all about experiences and adventure. The minute that I left the nest I spread my wings and was determined to take in whatever life could offer me. Wobbly and unsure in the unknown, I made many mistakes and filled my memory stores to the brim with life. My Mother would always say that I lived the life of a person three or four times my age and caution me to slow down. The world wound to a slow whir after the birth of my children and I fell into a routine life. I could have been a better Mother, not that I was ever a bad Mother... just looking back now I can think of a million or more things that I would have liked to had another chance at or add to. It's so taxing to love someone as much as you love your child...and yet the most amazing thing that I could never have even imagined. Back to my Mother... The world came to a crashing halt the day that she died. I somehow expected the whole world to pause and notice my grief. I felt like someone forced the very breath from my body and I couldn't remember how to inhale. The world was crashing upon me and burying me beneath; it all seemed so surreal. It's been 6 years since that happened and it never seems longer than last week. For whatever reason I cannot distance myself from it... I just bite it back and force myself to get through the day. Each miserable, agonizing day. I wish that I was strong enough to set it aside and not carry it with me; I almost forget what it was like to be carefree and truly happy. It was as if I had been filleted open and they ripped her from me, only to throw me a needle and thread and say "sew that shit up". Hallow. Empty. Aching. Alone. Living with grief isn't really living. It's like a parasite inside of you that is devouring and rapidly replicating itself until nothing is left of the you that once was. What is left is something else entirely. It's the weirdest thing because it didn't seem to happen as fast as it actually did. It began with the simple things, changing my hair, my look, my location. I cut away people systematically... I excused them for every reason; did they hurt me?, make me feel awkward or nervous?, were they unkind?, uncouth?...an embarrassment? Did they chain me with burden to the past and the me that fell away when the life left my mother? It really didn't matter, I could have lay down beside her on that table if they would have left me to it, but "they" did not. It's for the best really. I would have regretted leaving my children. If not for them I would have lost it a million times before this moment. They will me to live. I force my agony into tiny black boxes and bury them within the darkest crevices of my soul. I feel like I am standing on the shore of a black ocean in the pale moonlight watching them burst into blue flames as the drift over the horizon into the nothingness that I feel. Morbid perhaps.. but I feel peace there, surrounded by my grief... it reminds me that I didn't dream her. She was really here and she was unique and magical and horrible all at once. She was human and holy and the only God I knew for a lifetime. Did she leave or simply leave particles of herself in me that furiously and fervently manipulate my being into the me that she dreamed or beckoned from the belly of a star. I wonder if I will ever make it through all of the boxes of my grief. If I will ever truly mend and feel whole. For today, I am doing the best that I can and if it's not good enough, don't mind my absence from your judgement.