Big Blue, my old friend

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, Blue 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…

It took literal years to accept him as part of me (while trying to starve him off and escape his weighty grasp).

Around her birthday, he starts pulling on my pants leg. For the next five or six weeks, I drag him around everywhere I go. Then, every 24th of March, he finally takes over and wraps me tightly in his arms, stroking me ever so slowly, leaving remnants of The Big Hurt.

And like the ghost of Christmas past, he makes me relive that fateful day step by step.

It was a shitty Monday, but I was in a good mood. In my cubicle. Shawn said “it’s a bad day”. I said “Nah.” Then in my boss’s office. A phone call. There was an accident. They need me at home. The long, shaky car ride with Laurie. My great-grandma’s house. So many people. Familiar faces wrinkled, red, and coated in tears. My knees in the dirt.

Then my mother.

My broken mother.

My weeping, wailing, aching mother.

And, the waves came- crashing one after another: pain, numbness, pain.

And I drowned.

Over and over.

Year after year.

By now, Blue & I walked that old familiar road together so many times that i’ve learned to stop 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.