I am not okay, and I don't have pretty words to say so.
Today is the dark moon and seven days ago me and mine were blinded with grief we are still reeling from. Today I unloaded the dishes and cried stacking my coffee mugs in the cabinet, tossing the tupperware lid that won't.stop.falling.onto.the.floor into the trash, rinsing off the blue dinner plates I got from World Market so long ago the edges are chipped now. These everyday scenes...except now they happen to catch a leftover stray white doggie hair drifting through the air from the blue-eyed sweet thing who stole my heart two weeks ago. Yeah, and the funny thing is, she is gone now and yet her hair is all over my carpet, all in my clothes, in my car, her presence everywhere reminding me how love feels and how stupid-painful grief is, and how you never really know, do you, and how I will never adopt again because you never know if that sweet happy lovesong will turn into blue-eyed evil and attack a quiet little boy, random, out of the blue, unprovoked, without warning, leaving you in shock as the mother watches your husband literally tear his shirt out from her snarling, clenched jaws just to get the little boy free. And that hole in his shirt from her teeth, it's like the hole in your heart that just won't.stop.trembling as you hyperventilate-scream-sob in the car, knowing what this means now. That you must make the decision to take her back across town, through traffic, stop at a red light behind a car with “not my president” scrawled on the rear window, and your nose is running all over the place and you're out of the extra Starbucks napkins you keep in your car just for this. And then, as you press your face into the window, your husband gripping the wheel and your broken heart sitting quiet in the back seat with four paws and the softest nose, without a clue of what is happening, and you're choking and hardly breathing, a chime comes in. From your husband's phone. Your husband, who that very day was supposed to go on a motorcycle ride with a friend from work. And when that friend left early, your sweet man decides not to catch up with the sunshine, back roads and open air, but to come home, take you and your husky-love to the trails and enjoy a gorgeous day followed by togetherness on the patio with a dark-roast and a Venti water, please, with your heart lying quiet under your chair, watching the world. And then, innocent child hands, soft whispers, a rush of jaws and white fur and strained leash and husband pulling and young mother and scared boy and I don't know. And now we're sitting in traffic and my husband gets a text. His eyes are red and he is in shock, and I am taking my heart back to where she came from, and I don't even know. And he hands me his phone and so I read. I read the words. That his friend, the one he was supposed to meet up with, was killed that afternoon on a motorcycle ride. How do you hyperventilate-sob-scream in shock when you are already hyperventilating-sob-screaming in shock, and how is this even happening, and why is there so much traffic, and shouldn't he pull over? And blue eyes are quiet in the back. My heart is splattered everywhere. Someone just lost the one they loved and I am losing one I love and I could have lost The One I Love, maybe, because he was supposed to be there, too. And yet I still have him. The one who keeps reminding me to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Who gathers me close when I look at blue eyes in my iPhone, the photos I can't really see because I am crying so hard, and it's dumb because he could have died and somebody else did die and how does life just keep going on? And how can there be so.much.hair? And it's been seven days; why am I still crying?
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