2,592,000 seconds

is a long ass time

Time slows when you are watching it. When you are begging for it to pass quickly.

I sit in every agonizing second. Praying to fall asleep quickly, so eight hours can sweep by.

Eight hours I don’t have to think through, exist in, count the time, watch the clock.

Each morning, I awake with the small relief that I am pulled one day closer to him.

It feels so weird to be with myself again.

I had been a unit for so long, a pair, buy one get one free, and now I feel awkward in my own company. My friends start to look at me like I’m one sock.

Spring slowly opens up, bud by bud, crocus by crocus. Yellow forsythia brightens up the grey and muddy landscape.

A hollowness forms in my belly.

Sam and I had never been apart for more than a few days.

We did all of the pandemic together. Spent a year and a half always within reach.

By no means were we co-dependent. I have thought about this. We just were deeply etched into each other’s lives. We knew the curves and grooves of our days, worn them in together. We were to be wed for god sake.

Pinterest: Omar Omar

As the days pass, I’m surrounded by this strange silence. This eerie calm that follows an explosion, knocked flat on my back from the blast of fate. I was left stunned, sustained in the unsettling after-silence, squinting up at the too-bright sky. It was a quiet that can only be defined in relation to the outburst before it.

In that silence is when I started to notice the wounds, as if my right leg had blown off. I marched through every day without pain meds or anesthesia, without a brace or crutches, hobbling around from place to place, trying to act like nothing had happened.

I’m fine! I’m strong! I can muster through this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

With every interaction–friend, stranger, coworker, barista– I stitched on a happy smile as I whipped away the oozing blood, hid my pain, because hey I got my dream job! Wasn’t this worth it!? Hey I was still in New York! Isn’t that great?!

The pain I was feeling was so large, I started having this weird urge to be struck by a comet.

Or an anvil.

Something large and heavy, unforeseen and comically unlikely. I cannot fully explain this. I absolutely did not want to die. I very much wanted to live.

However, the only explanation I can come up with is that I wanted to be physically crushed. I needed by body to mirror how destroyed I felt on the inside. I wanted to feel a bone snap. Maybe if my body broke, the grief living inside me could escape.

People can see a cast, a bandage, a wheelchair and think, “Oh my god, how much pain you must be in!” We can’t do that with our emotional wounds. There is often no tangible evidence of our pain.

Our emotional scars do not heal over in a way we can pull up a sleeve and show it to people. No one can see how wrecked we are internally.

Prairie voles have symptoms of depression after being seperated from their monogamous mate. Magpies hold funerals. Elephants return to the graves of their friends and lovers. There is something animalistic in our grief, in separation, in responding to devastating change. I was nothing more than a chimp in a dress with a salary who also couldn’t muster up an appetite.

It took nothing for me to start crying in public or private. A sad song plays that I don’t skip. Walking past a bar or cafe Sam and I loved. If I see an old couple, forget about it.

My chin warbling, tears forming in my eyes, I learned how to cry without ruining my makeup. (Tilt your head back and let your tears roll to the side of your face towards your ears, not down your cheeks.)

At the end of each day, I came home to a still apartment. The coldness of opening the door to an empty, lifeless 500 square feet never stopped feeling dizzying.

Each night I descended into a maddening darkness.

Lick my wounds. Wallow in my fate.

Why aren’t we able to celebrate this together?

Why aren’t we together?

Why is he so far away?

The quiet pained my ears.

Counting, clocking, how many seconds, minutes, hours fill 30 days.

Never before have I felt every moment pass.

Never before did I believe I couldn’t make it.