it still comes.

you know how when you get a really deep wound, they tell you to apply pressure so you don't bleed out.

sometimes that's how this feels.  like i've just stopped the pain but it's there, under my fingertips, pulsing, waiting for my grip to slip.  it's nights like these, where i've read my poetry and sipped my tea, where addy's breaths are beside me, where i've taken my xanax and one two three... still.awake.

i think about him, sometimes i think i hear my children crying.  i almost always think that if i stay awake.  my worst fears, confirmed, another child slipped through my fingers.  when elly died people told me "this is the worst you'll ever live through" and i felt this sense of foreboding when it was said.  everything in me wanted to knock on wood and throw my hands up like "i'm not the one testing fate over here!" and that's the reality isn't it? there is no threshold to suffering.  there is no quota to be filled, some of us simply suffer more than others.

i would like to know that my days of intense, soul ripping loss are behind me, but they could very well not be.  sometimes that fear plays into my mind and i panic and worry and fret.  i'm not always strong.

i've worked so hard on my house here.  it was important to me, the first time i lived alone.  it was very defining, the decision making process, what i left, what i took.  there was no mediation, there was no deciding between the parties.  and then i arrived, tabula rasa, and it was crucial for me to breathe myself into my house.  for every nook and cranny to quietly say "this is bria"

but sometimes, sometimes it still feels lonely.  sometimes i miss my house saying "bria and jim."
sometimes i think about his touch and his smile and his laugh and his teasing and his friendship and i cry because i know, i know the loss.  i know the ache of carrying a past into the future.  i know what it's like to be burned.  i know what it feels like when forever ends when you are 28 years old and you watch your baby and husband die in a matter of days.

i have been sutured, but the scarring has not occurred.  healing has begun but it will never finish.  i have a necklace that i wear, a memorial of elly and jim, sometimes i have to take it off because the physical weight of carrying them around with me becomes too heavy to bear.  i haven't had it on in a couple of days.



jim.
i wish you would have stayed.
love,
bria