So Far Away

Now that we're here, it’s so far away, all the struggle we thought was in vain. And all the mistakes one life contained, they all finally start to go away. Now that we’re here, it’s so far away, and I feel like I can face the day. I can forgive, and I’m not ashamed to be the person that I am today.

Writing is one of my favorite pastimes. It’s cathartic. It’s brave and inspiring. It’s a way of keeping memories alive, or at least of giving them a chance to not completely disappear. And it was one of the first things I wanted to do in the early days following Mark’s suicide. Though it took me a while to get the ball rolling, I started this blogging journey while I still lived in the apartment where he killed himself, just shy of three months into my new life. I wrote just once and saved it in my Google Docs. Then I pretended it didn’t exist for quite a long time; I think I may have read it only once between its conception and ten minutes ago.

I read it now and see how far I’ve come. For me, it is laced with insecurities, doubt, shame and guilt, all of which are traits of having grown up with and also marrying an addict. The English teacher in me clearly cared more about its grammatical integrity than expressing anything more than surface-level emotion. It’s filled with anger that hurt too much to fully express. It reminds me of the Maggie of my childhood, the one who wants to please others, but also has so much more to say. She’s the girl who feels she can only let her true self out in little bits at a time and then punishes herself for having done so.

There must be something in the air this time of year that brings me back to writing. I remember writing this first post, if you can even call it that, since it’s taken me nearly two years to post it. It was about then that I began to feel bothered by being in the apartment where my husband had killed himself. PTSD was setting in, though I didn’t know it at the time, and the only way I could come up with to describe how I felt at just about any given moment was, “I feel like I’m going to burst.” It felt that way for a long time, until writing gave me an outlet a year ago, which was also about a year from the initial attempt at a blog. So here it is, unedited. My goodness, I’ve come a long way.

9/22/16 01:23

I can’t fucking sleep. Or maybe I just don’t want to and want to be right about how I can’t sleep. And I keep thinking, maybe one of these days I’ll write a book about this. Like a place to write my thoughts down. And then I second guess myself. So this is not me starting a book. But if I WERE to write a book...wtf would it be about??? I don’t want it to be all about grief. Or suicide. Or widowhood. Or Mark. Writing about just one of those feels like putting too much emphasis on one thing. And I don’t dare write a book about myself. But wtf else would I write about?

So this is me not writing about any of those in particular. Perhaps I’ll just continue to journal and publish that someday. Somebody else is bound to go through a similar experience, and maybe it will help them. Or maybe not because maybe everybody else is like me and thinks that nobody understands.

I don’t like reading other people’s blogs. I just notice where we DON’T relate. I don’t want to go to groups and talk about this stuff because nobody gets it like I do. I’m angry and pissed, and I don’t like it. I want somebody to hurt like me, and I feel bad about that. I don’t like that this is part of my life. That which you resist persists. I know this. And I can’t seem to get myself beyond that this actually IS my life. That my husband shot himself in the room next to the one I’m in right now. That he was only 23. That we were married not even 2 years. That I wanted to end our marriage because I just couldn’t see how to do it anymore.