Voices

There are some moments when I feel okay.  I am thinking of Ron, filled with such great memories, and am full of gratitude at having shared my few years with him.  Sometimes I feel like the love we shared will be enough to last me my whole lifetime.  I could not want anything more – to have loved and to have been loved, that is enough, even if I spend the rest of my life alone.  I was loved so hard and I loved so fiercely.  For all the moments when I am mean to myself, wishing I had done this or that better, regretting places or people we didn’t get a chance to visit, or agonizing over something I wish I hadn’t or had said or did, I know, deep down, that really I loved Ron Clark very well.  I loved him with everything that I had.  It was enough for him.  He did not want for anything in our relationship.  I know that.  I gave him all I had and it was enough.  He told me so.  He showed me.  He radiated how complete and whole he felt with me.  I go on loving him with everything I have, fully prepared to do this with as much intensity for the rest of my life.  That is how much I loved and still love him.

There are other moments when I am filled with stupid thoughts.  Obsessive ideas.  Illogical conclusions.  Irrational invented moments or conversations or plans that in all likelihood probably did not even exist.  My brain tells me all the ways Ron was not happy.  Would have rather been somewhere else or with someone else.  Was just with me because I happened to be there . . . because I had an instant crush and he was too kind to turn me away.  In my head, I was never good enough for him.  He could have done better.

I have these thoughts in the face of so much evidence to the contrary.  I know they are bullshit.  I know it.  Yet, there are some days when I cannot seem to shake them.  I have the awareness that they are not true.  I am no longer following each thought down the rabbit hole and believing it.  I can observe them as separate from reality, at least a little bit.  But, that does not seem to stop them from happening.  They come and keep coming, one right after the other.  They take work to dispel.  They keep me awake at night.  I lay in bed crying and cannot make them cease.  They defy the laws of sleep aids.  And when I wake, they are still there, waiting to be picked up and carried around for another day.

I don’t want to do this to myself.  I don’t want to do this to Ron.  I really do need to stop thinking these things.  I need to remember what was and is good.  I need to preserve the relationship that we had (and can continue to have, albeit mainly one-sided).  I owe it to myself.  I owe it to him.  I owe it to us. 

More simply, I am not going to survive if I keep this up.  These thoughts are poison.  I cannot continue to take them day after day without something inside myself cracking . . . a fault line on this thin crust of sanity upon which I stand and fight my way forward into each day of my existence that I would rather be with Ron.  The thoughts are danger.  I have to keep distance from them. 

I have to remember what I experienced and knew to be true and real.  I have to make the love enough to carry me forth with some shred of hope that I can just live and perhaps even be happy living knowing the love we shared. 

Every day in this process is work.  It is challenging.  It is exhausting.  There is nothing about it that is simple.  I don’t know if many people understand that.  There is nothing about grieving that is stagnant.  It changes daily, as do I. 

The thoughts interfere with my grief process.  They stall me.  Slow me.  They are perhaps part of it, but if so, they may be an unnecessary part . . . a lethargic, dragged-out, self-inflicted pain that is different from the pain of just dealing with the fact that he is gone. 

I want them to end.  I believe, overall, they are reducing.  Subsiding.  I am more self-aware of them.  I believe them less and less.  I question their source and validity more and more.  But, they still happen.  And I wish they didn’t. 

Somewhere in the very early months of dating Ron, I had a moment of panic in which I was sure it would never work out.  He would never really want to stay with me.  Once he got to know me, he would find me too neurotic and anxious.  I am too damaged to be loved.  It would just end nine and a half years later, like my previous relationship.  I wanted to spare us both the wasted time and pain.  I named for him all the reasons I was bad and it would not work.  I offered a way out . . . the opportunity for us to “end on a good note and just walk away with no real harm done.”  He said then, and would say on the (thankfully) very rare instances when this line of self-deprecating thinking resurfaced, “You tell those voices in your head to shut the fuck up, Babydoll.  I love you.  I’m not going anywhere.  You can’t get rid of me that easily.” 

I try to imagine him telling me this now.  I can almost hear it.