After he was killed, it was so easy to stay down.

Barricaded not only in my house but my emotions, thoughts and feelings. I’d torture myself with not looking at the memories as a gift, but more so, a reminder of that which could never be again. Even as the light would creep in through the darkness, I still didn’t allow myself to feel and live the way I already knew how to live when he was alive, but instead the way I thought I was supposed to live because he was dead. How can I exist, let alone smile and feel alive with my soul mate not here?

No one wanted to accept that I’m madly in love with a dead man, so separating myself from others and feeling that I could only live in a bubble became a notion I was ready to fulfill, as long as it meant I could live in his love.

But that’s the thing…I wasn’t.

The love we share is unrelenting, full of life, an explorer of the world and all the emotions out there waiting for us to feel them. It’s a love that does not sit and wait for something to happen, but goes out and gets it. A love that defines the infinite and creates feelings in which words have not been created to describe.

But what was I doing?

The opposite. Afraid to go out into a world that I was letting the fear of the unknown and those who did not know hold me back. A fear that smiling, laughing…living would make others believe that suddenly my love and pain was waning for Michael.

But those notions, each and every one noted and unnoted, are things in retrospect that I have learned were my own aversion from embracing this life before me.

So I stopped.

Now my life is defined by the love that I know. The love that is compiled of all the things I spoke about. The love that has made me feel alive after I died inside, the love that grabbed the paddles, placed them on my corpse of a life, and recuperated me into living the life that I know Michael is looking down on with pride…and maybe a little envy 🙂 and most of all gratification in the fact that I did what he was whispering through my soul, but did not allow myself to hear with the glaring pitch of grief…that to honor his life, and the gifts he’s left me with, is to be the woman he fell in love with and proudly announced as his wife…to be Taryn.

“The reason why all men honor love is because it looks up, and not down; aspires and not despairs”
Ralph Waldo Emerson