Sometimes I torture myself by looking at pictures of myself when I was younger.
Not because getting older bothers me, but because it intrigues me to study them for how I looked before life disintegrated into a cloud of dust around me.
I study the eyes of the young woman who’d just met this super handsome guy wearing BDUs, with a moustache to die for, and I wonder at the power of Love that lit up her features.
I study pictures of Chuck and I on our first weekend away together, still newly involved, and feel the lightness of being.
Look into the eyes of a woman supremely happy-more than happy, really-living life with a man who was the leading man in a true romance…
I love, too, looking at pictures that I took of Chuck, because I know that the smile on his face is for me, the woman he loved, as he looks directly at me holding the camera.
It’s been a struggle since his death, remembering our time together, and I know that this is normal, but Jesus it was horrifying when amnesia about our life together blew into my mind almost the second he took his last breath. It was as if we’d never existed together. As if he’d been a mirage in my life.
He’s so unreal to me now. Our life together is so unreal to me now. Did I once know a man named Chuck Dearing? Was I once the most loved of women? And, if he did exist, and we had a life together, was it just yesterday or was it in another lifetime?
Did Chuck die over 6 years ago, or was it yesterday?
I know that I haven’t lost my mind, but it feels like I have most definitely lost my mind and I’ve been alone forever and that this heaviness in my heart has been there as long as I’ve been alive.
Jesus.
Widowhood is most definitely, most assuredly…not for sissies.
I miss you, D.