For the past two days, the sky has been blue.
Impressive? Well, of course not, but the sky had not been blue in what had seemed like weeks.
When I awoke to rays of sunlight streaming into my apartment, hours before my alarm, I felt a strange sort of comfort. Maybe my episode had come due to the gray skies and chill in the air that came without warning. “Of course”, I supposed, “This is due to the changing seasons; a clear sky and sun will do me good.” However, this optimism only lasted a few minutes. Before I could process anything, my head hit the pillow, and I fell back asleep.
When I awoke a few hours later, I felt an emptiness. A familiar emptiness; one that I had awakened to many mornings. The sun still shone through my apartment, only obstructed by the partition I kept behind my couch. But contrary to my fleeting thought hours ago, the sun did not provide an anecdote. I rolled over to my left, looking at the time; if I did not get out of bed within the minute, I would surely not make it to work on time, but I did not care.
I closed my eyes for only a few minutes longer, in an attempt to mentally prepare myself for a day that required no mental preparation. I grabbed the baggiest, comfiest clothes that I could find, washed my face, and brushed my teeth. I looked at myself in the mirror; I looked quite tired. I used to get compliments on what I wore at work; surely that was no longer the case. But it was ok; I dressed like the others did now, but that was my sign of an internal defeat.
When I was young, my father always wore a dress shirt and tie to work. When questioned about this, since the other teachers preferred casual wear, he would respond, “I made a promise to someone,” referring to his former secretary who had passed away a few years earlier. I watched my mother scold my father for his reckless spending; he always had to buy another tie. I suppose I have inherited impulsivity in spending from my father.
In the last few years of his life, my father broke this promise. He began wearing baggy shirts paired with semi-professional slacks. I suppose this was one of the many signs of the deterioration of his mental state. Who would ever think that a change in dress could signify something so drastic?
I thought about him this morning, not out of active desire, but the night before I stumbled upon a picture of him. The photo made me sick; it sent me down the spiral that I had been down a million times since he died; he is dead, I will never see him again. It seems quite obvious that a loved one’s death would warrant a stage of denial, but how long should this denial truly last? I suppose there is a fair bit of existentialism tied to it: how can someone who has been there with you for your entire life just disappear? I do not know if I will ever fully process his absence, maybe on Christmas when he’s not there to pick the wrapping paper up, or during the playoff season when we do not manically text about how well or poorly, mostly the latter, our team is playing. Will what happened truly ever “hit” me, or is that a lie that we tell ourselves to promise a finite end to grief?
I suppose I should just wait for the day that I stop asking myself these questions; stop trying to figure grief out. I suppose for today I will let myself be and let the sky be blue; today does not need to be the day that I figure everything out.
m.
