I know I’m not actually a split personality.  I haven’t disassociated from my body.  There is nothing really wrong with me because what I’m going through is normal.  I know this.

This grief, though.  Whoa.

My brain sometimes slips into my consciousness the suspicion that maybe I am a split personality. Or whatever word it is that would best describe this state of being, at least to my own self.  Because I very clearly feel like two separate people as I move through this world of mine, this world without my husband.

I still measure my life by the words without my husband.  And I’m okay with that measure because that’s how I feel it.  Grief is the blood that runs through my veins and each and every heart beat bears the rhythm of his absence.  Each moment is tinged with the knowing-ness of loss and death.  There isn’t a second where, even as I interact with life, my insides aren’t writhing in pain.

And yet.

I look completely normal on the outside.  I join in on conversations and activities.  I laugh.  I cry too, without concern for where I am or who’s around.  Whatever emotion is there, I let it be.  To all appearances, I’m doing well.  But inside, there is sheer agony.

Lately, however,  I’ve begun to wonder how it’s even possible to have these outsides and this inside and have them both be true.  Is it a coping mechanism that just happens all by itself?  I haven’t consciously developed this being-it’s all just evolved and I suddenly had the thought a few days ago that this is who I am now.  One on the outside and a hugely different one on the inside.

Mostly, though, I don’t try to figure it out.  I have a possibly abysmal lack of curiosity about the whys and wherefores of anything.  I move with the flow and allow whatever needs to, to flow through me.

All I really know in my life is that I miss my husband desperately.