Honestly... Apathy.
So many questions, both for the world and in my small corner of it.
Why? Where? What?
Why do bad things happen? Why do they happen to good people?
Why do you sleep all day? Why do you stay so closed off?
Where is God in the bad times? Where do we look to?
Where is your motivation? Where is your energy?
What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose?
What do you want to do with your life? What do you think about going back to school or work?
Honestly, I don’t know the answers all the time.
Honestly, I don’t need a “why,” a “where,” or a “what.”
I don’t look for them, I don’t have to, I don’t want to. Maybe that should scare me,
but,
honestly... I don’t care.
Shinji’s Watch (Grief and Other Things)
6 August 1945, 08:15
That is the moment a watch owned by Shinji Mikamo (and his father, and grandfather) froze in time. The moment the American nuclear bomb hit Hiroshima, the moment Shinji's world fell apart around him. Shinji's watch, held an eternal prisoner, a forever reminder, of the devastation. Many years ago I first heard that story, it always stood out to me but I never really grasped the magnitude of the occurrence. Shinji's watch didn't cross my mind again until several years later, when I remembered it in the midst of tears, trying to articulate the way I felt after my boyfriend's accident and passing, the way I've known that I'll feel for the rest of my life.
Like Shinji's timepiece, abruptly frozen in a singular moment of devastation, a part of me will always be stuck in that moment, at 19, when my whole world came crashing down around me, right before my eyes. A part of me will always be imprinted, frozen in place. Every step I take towards the future, a part of me remains unmoving, every new day inevitably passing, yet somehow still feeling only a heartbeat away from that moment. A part of me will always be a reminder of that moment, in feeling it's absence in the present, and it's presence in the past. I also know another part of me left this earth with him, and that the shattered pieces of my heart and soul will never fit together the right way again. I'm 21 now, and I feel it every day, I always will. I feel it like liquor burning down my throat without the benefit of a buzz after every halfhearted smile and empty "I'm fine."
I feel it each time I've held my memory bear at 3 A.M. sobbing, knowing the only person who can truly comfort me is the one who's in Heaven. I feel it each time an inside joke comes to me, only for my smile to drop when I know it can no longer gain me the sound of my favorite laugh in the world. I feel it in my pause when someone asks me my age, or the date, my mind first going to the last time I felt whole, to the place where a part of me stays. It hits me like a freight train when I wake up from dreaming to the heartbreak and realization of reality in the morning. I feel it when I'm suddenly fighting back tears at a party because I saw a cap like his out of the corner of my eye and felt my heart briefly skip and then sink all over again. I feel it every time another loss cuts into my already scarred heart.
Grief, often times, happens to a group of people, but it is very singular in the way it affects each person on their own. Everyone is different in the way that they feel, handle, and express their grief, even if they're experiencing the same loss as another person. I don't write about my grief today in hopes for expressions of sympathy or attention, I write in hopes that I will be able to touch someone else in pain, and help them to express the way they feel, and for those I love who experience loss. I write because I know that the depth to which my hurt runs is a nod to how much of an impact was left on my life by my boyfriend, and how much love I hold for him, my everything. I love you, Teague. Forever and Always.