The Valley

I promised myself I wouldn't get all weepy and depressed this Thanksgiving, but a wave of grief has passed over me today. And I don't know where it is coming from because it isn't just Katie, or at least I don't think so. It started after my visit to GS. You never really know how much you miss someone until you see them again and are given another chance to taste what it was like before. And I started to regret change which is something I can't allow myself to do. I felt so wonderful all day, so overjoyed that I had those wonderful shivers of pleasure. I wouldn't have left, except that I knew that I needed to. And on the drive back I felt this dark sadness come over me like a big fat rain cloud. And for a moment I throught I was going to cry, got that tight feeling in my chest and the inability to swallow properly, but then it went away.
And then there is Katie...that knot in my stomach that forms without me even knowing whenever Thanksgiving rolls around, that rises without trigger or reason or purpose until it finds its way out. Here I am preoccupied with a million other things and yet she finds her way into my dreams. Last night was the first time I saw Katie alive in my dreams. I've dreamed her dead over and over again, laying in the casket looking not a thing like herself, but this time I saw her alive. We were at a party and I kept losing sight of her, and I followed her because I wanted to touch her one last time. I woke up with tears all over my pillow and had to reach for my inhaler. Because it was so real even though I knew that it was a dream while dreaming it, and when I woke up, I woke up to a world where Katie was dead.
I think to myself, it's been three years, and that's along time. But it will be forever and forever is so much longer. It's not some kind of horrible storm that with enough patience and courage you can just wait out. And then I realize that I can't remember the last time I saw her alive, and when someone says the name Katie, the second image that pops into my head is of Katie in the sitting on the opposite side of the table at the Mathcounts meet making fun of the woman giving instructions, because the first image was of the way her arms looked folded limp across her chest that night at the wake. And so Katie ceases to be someone alive who happened to die, but someone dead who was once alive. And that is a grief in itself.
So tonight I am trying to reconcile loss. HA! Easier said than done. I'm trying to accept that there is a whole universe of unknowns and all of time before and after our existence that we cannot name. And that if we don't push ourselves forward, time will do it for us, and it is much better for this passage to be consensual. That's my musing for the night.