Every year on this day, the Big Blue grabs a hold of me.
When the accident happened, I didn’t know him at all. I was young, and though traumatized in my own right, he was unfamiliar. He didn’t introduce himself very well; he didn’t tell me that he came to stay… maybe that was a part of his plan… but it took literal years to accept him as part of me while learning how to starve him off and escape his weighty grasp.
Once I finally found a way to cope, I could basically put him off until I couldn’t anymore.
Around her birthday, he would start pulling on my pants leg. For the next five or six weeks, I would drag him around everywhere I went. Then, every 24th of March, he would finally take over and wrap me tightly in his arms, stroking me with The Big Hurt.
And like the ghost of Christmas past, he would make me relive that fateful day step by step.
It was a shitty Monday, but I was in a good mood. In my cubicle. Then my boss’s office. There was an accident. They need me at home. The car ride. My grandma’s house. So many people. Familiar faces wrinkled, red, and coated in tears.
Then my mother.
My broken mother.
My weeping, wailing aching mother.
Finally, the waves came- crashing one after another: pain, numbness, pain. And I drowned.
By the time Blue & I walked that old familiar road together for the 7th or 8th time, I stopped being afraid.
The weight of fighting him while carrying him around made my soul sore. But once I learned to accept him & let him be, he came to me more gently. And he leaves me now, for longer and longer each visit…
But these days, I have learned to wait for him; I expect him, I allow him. On her b-day, on her d-day, on holidays, when the clock says 12:34, or when a butterfly or bird flies just a little too close, I see her. And I feel him.
But I know him now. And I’ve learned to sit with him in the stillness. And he keeps her close.