29 years today.
Grief is so much more than just missing the person who is gone.
It is everything that fills every moment that they should have still been there.
It is a lifetime.
It's the long, dark nights with star filled skies, trying to find the brightest one, and naively believing that if I wished just hard enough, maybe, I could have one more day with her. It is wondering who I would have become if she was still here. It is never knowing the life we should have shared together as a family.
It is missing the childhood that was ripped away from me in the blink of an eye.
It is grieving the little girl who stopped living, before she even knew what it meant to dream.
(Funny how dreaming would become my escape).
It is in the way I was mishandled after she left, it is felt in the failing hands of those who were supposed to protect me when she couldn't anymore. It is grief compounded by more and more grief. Loss is everywhere I look.
Loss of my hometown, my friends, my family, my safety, my innocence, my very foundation. It is the complete loss of me.
It is in every movie, TV show or song I hear that came out before April 22, 1995. It's wondering "did she listen to them? Has she seen this? I wonder if she laughed at that. I wonder what her voice sounds like? Did she talk to us about her leaving? I wonder what she thinks of me now... I wonder... I wonder... I wonder...".
All I could and can ever do is wonder - and that wonder is surrounded by grief. Even daydreaming hurt, because I would daydream of being with my mom again. A dream that is so vivid, I can almost convince myself it is real. In a lot of ways, grief also became my escape.
There was no escape.
You see, that's the thing about grief... it seeps into every corner, every aspect of your life. It's everywhere. It's everything.
It's life without her.
Life without my mom.
A lifetime....
A lifetime that will never make sense.
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